Denniston Moss

Denniston lichens and mosses

The day after our tour of Stockton Mine, Robin and I visited the next plateau south: Denniston. The rich seams of Denniston coal were extensively and famously pit-mined for nearly a century. Denniston's mining history has been romantically immortalised in a couple of popular novels which in turn support some excellent visitor resources on the Plateau.

Top of the Incline (once touted as the 8th wonder of the world!) at Denniston

I like looking at bits of rusty old mining kit as much as the next girl but I really wanted to get a feel for the natural landscape that is (probably) soon going to be open cast mined like Stockton.  The landscape is very similar to what Stockton would have been like before Solid Energy started blasting the surface away. I also really wanted to meet one of the famous snails. 

Looking South from Stockton onto Denniston Plateau

The Arctic has polar bears. The Sumatran rainforest has orangutans.  Every endangered ecosystem needs at least one charismatic megafauna to rally support for habitat conservation. The Buller coal plateau (which includes Stockton and Denniston Plateaux) is an endangered ecosystem so harsh that the most charismatic megafauna it can offer is a giant carnivorous land snail that sucks up live worms like spaghetti.  Unfortunately, as defenders of the plateau have found, snails have a repuation that make most people consider them a slightly ludicrous animal to bother saving.  It's difficult, even for a lifelong greenie like myself, to not secretly snigger just a little about saving snails.

Powelliphanta patrickensis (photo from Forest and Bird)

Of course its not just unique and remarkable snails that are at risk, but an entire unique and remarkable ecosystem (of which snails are a near-top-level predator, much like the polar bear in the Arctic, but infinitely less cuddly-looking). Denniston Plateau's environment is based on a layer of concrete-like sandstone with almost no soil; 6m p/a rainfall with no drainage, at a high altitude between mountains and sea, blasted almost year round with icy Southern winds. 

Typical Denniston landscape- exposed rock with a few short tough plants clinging to tiny nooks and hollows

The tallest trees grow to about knee height in most places.  Most of the animal life is invertebrate, with a few rare birds and lizards who survive there because it is too harsh an environment for the kind of pests that have demolished most of the rest of NZ's native animals. 

My favourite Denniston plant

I didn't see any snails. Or other insects, though I turned over a few rocks looking. No birds, no lizards, nothing but the most enchanting clumps of moss and lichen. We did meet lots of mining vehicles thundering along the narrow twisty gravel roads to and on the Plateau. Bathurst (the company granted consent to open cut on Denniston Plateau) is already open cut mining out the back at Cascade Mine, accessed across Denniston.  

Reminds me of the saucer gardens I used to make when I was a child

This environment is so fragile, so tenuously maintained on the hard sandstone cap that lies above the coal, that I just can't see how Bathurst  can possibly pretend they will be able to restore it after mining.  Like Solid Energy's efforts at Stockton Mine, they may go to a great deal of trouble to make sure the landscape looks green and tidy, (which is admittedly an improvement on pre-RMA mining companies leaving a big toxic mess as at Tui). I mean, look at these pictures.  The ecosystem that is there now is unique to the sandstone cap and can't be replicated on top of blasted rubble with manufactured soil, grass seed and native plantings.  It may very well be a parkland afterwards, but it won't be much like it is now.

Charismatic microflora.  Could a Save the Moss campaign work? It is kind of cuddly looking. 

Coal mining in the bad old days was difficult, dirty and dangerous. Miners died underground in explosions, fires, collapses and gassy pockets. They died overground in machinery failures. If they survived the immediate dangers many still died young of black lung from inhaling coal dust.

Denniston Miners (photos from the interpretive boards on site)

Today coal mining continues to be difficult, dirty and dangerous.  I'm still stitching my memorials to the men who died at Pike River few miles from Denniston not even two years ago.

New Zealand Coal Mining Disasters remembered at Denniston

An open cut mine in a regulated industry is undoubtably less dangerous for workers who spend most of their days inside the comfortable cabs of heavy machinery. But the dangers to the environment from coal mining are both localised and global, immediate and long term. Blasting a landscape, filling the air with dust and acidifying streams are bad enough but burning coal into greenhouse gases is inherently dirty. Clean coal is a dirty lie.  The only clean coal is in the hole.


The difficulty is overcoming the greed of coal mining directors and shareholders who deny that climate change is their problem (yet Colorado burns up as I write this).  The difficulty lies in changing a whole global economic system entirely based on digging up sequestered carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere.

"As new processes evolve, future generations might wonder why their ancestors wastefully burnt so much of this rare and precious fossil fuel."

Open Cut (warning, lots of photos of mining)

BEFORE: Stockton Plateau, looking towards Happy Valley aka Cyprus Extension, not yet open cut but riddled with undergound mine shafts)  See all the blue tarns? The sandstone is a waterproof seal and the rainfall 6m p/a so most of the water just sits on the surface in big puddles making a unique ecosystem.

Ever since I found out that Solid Energy sponsors (almost free) tours of its open cut coal mine at Stockton I've wanted to go visit.  Yes, there are plenty of coal mines (at Huntly) close to where I live but they don't offer 5-6 hour guided tours with an ex-miner-guide mostly paid for by the company!  Mines are such dangerous (not to mention controversial) places  (like this local one closed today due to methane build up) and very few allow the public inside.  I spend way too much time searching the internet looking for mine tours, so I know this for sure.

DURING: An open cut mine is visually confusing because its really just a big mucky mess in a constant state of flux. 

 So I schemed and planned and persuaded my buddy Robin (who has visited Stockton before for her work and is the friend most tolerant of my current mine obsession) to take me there last week. The reason I really really wanted to see a mine with my own eyes is evident in these photos I took on the tour.  Photographs of mines are really difficult to make sense of (I've made these ones as big as I can to help you). The enormous scale, muddy colours and dusty atmosphere combine to make it very difficult to tell what is up or down, vertical or horizontal; just the kind of information I need to interpret or represent a mine in textile relief.  I hoped that the tour would give me, literally, a fresh insight into mining topography.

AFTER:  These stripes are the kind of repetitive pattern I was looking for.  Just to give you a sense of scale,  the little  square thing in the middle of the image is the top of the cab of a really big truck.
The greenish terraces at the top of the image have been revegetated. The greyish ones in the middle are being prepared for revegetation. The tan coloured lower middle and foreground are where sandstone is being dumped from new cuts elsewhere on the mine. When the big hole is filled to a reasonable slope, they'll prep the soil and transfer the vegetation from the next cut to be opened.
Oh, but that ridge on the skyline? that was once Mt Augustus and some 80metres higher than it is now.   

The emphasis of the tour was two-fold: looking at BIG diggers and other kit, which was what the two guys on the tour were there for; and showing off a cutting edge revegetation programme which is probably why Solid Energy sponsors our visit. "Look what extremes we go to to appease environmentalists! See how we tenderly cherish our rare snails! Isn't it pretty! Isn't it natural looking!"  

Stockpiles of coal at the top, muddy hole to be filled at the bottom, revegetation in the foreground

Yeah yeah, whatever, show me how you get the coal. I'm not very interested in the big machines (which are actually quite small compared to Australian mining kit I've seen) and I'm pretty cynical about the reveg. Show me how the mine works!

The colour scheme is coal black and sandstone white with a greenish backdrop of native vegetation. Oh, did I mention that Solid Energy, a state owned power company, is mining here adjacent to Department  of Conservation land (hence the close attention to revegetation and appeasing the public)

 Stockton was mined underground for nearly a century  before technology and economics made open cut a more profitable approach.  A thick seam of very high quality coal sits below about 20metres of concrete-hard sandstone on a high plateau swept by icy winds.  They fill the shafts of the old underground mine with sandy concrete then drill holes for explosives to break up the overburden.

20 metres of sandstone scaped away and now they are digging out a thick seam of rich black coal

Oh before they do that, they scoop up 15cm or so of what passes for top soil on the plateau with all the plants in situ and truck that over to a part of the site where all the coal is already extracted and the ground prepared.  Once that is out of the way, the overburden is scooped into trucks and trundled across the site to be dumped in a big hole.  When they get down to the coal they scoop that into trucks and dump onto stock piles. Depending on the quality of coal it might get washed and crushed  before being blended (and this is the bit that gets me) with lower quality coal so as to make the most possible money. Yes that's right, the high quality coal is too valuable to waste on today's low commodity prices, so they mix it up with rubbishy coal that is even more polluting.  Eventually the coal sails down the mountain in ariel wagons, is loaded onto trains bound for Lyttleton port and then onto ships, mostly to be burned in Indian steel works.

Hgh quality 'peacock coal', almost pure carbon. Way too special just to burn for electricity.  I no longer think of coal as dirty and bad for the environment. What we do with it, like profligate burning is dirty and bad but coal in the ground or a piece in your hand like this, is just beautiful.

In some ways I got what I wanted out of my Stockton experience. It was really interesting and educational and I feel much more confident about interpreting photographs of open cast mines.  On the other hand, I don't feel any more ready to make a mine out of blankets than I did before.  The reality is so much messier than I want my art to be.  The only strong visual patterns are the stockpiles and terraces at the end of the mining process, and the seams and faces of coal itself in the short time its exposed.

One last look down on the mine before we go...

I understand now that mining, at least at Stockton, is all about rapidly changing the landscape, so that it is different from week to week, even day to day. Our tour driver had to keep checking to see if a road she took last week was still there for us this week.  Any representation of an active mine would be outdated immediately and yet this challenge has opened a new direction for me.

I carried my new insights and memories like a glowing ember inside for the rest of my week on the West Coast.  By the time we drove back over snowy Arthur's Pass I was on fire with new ideas for making. Watch this space to see where this mining experience takes my art next, but first expect more posts with photos from other places we saw in the South Island.

Me and a really big truck

In the Window Gallery

Today is the start of my latest exhibition, Extraction on in the Window Gallery of Objectspace in Ponsonby Auckland.  The Window Gallery can be seen 24/7- peer through the glass at night or step inside during the day for a closer look.  

Seep I & II, Spill I  &  II and Slick I  &  II

Its a small gallery (though much bigger than the Sanderson window I just pulled Dispersant out of).  In it I'm showing six small framed embroideries about oil spills and two larger three dimensional works about mining. Laura Howard has written a lovely essay to accompany the show.

Opencast Australia, reworked for the wall

I've long aspired to show my work at Objectspace and so this is (yet another) dream come true. (So many of my dreams come true, its lucky I'm good at generating new dreams so I don't run out).  The extraordinarily sweet Laura did a beautiful job of curating and installing, with some help from me.  It was a bit of joke though because she has a broken foot and I was (am) still recovering from a debilitating illness. We were like two half-people trying to help each other put the work up and accommodate each other's limitations.

Seep I & II in their beautiful frames

If my regular readers think you recognise these works, you are right, nothing is brand new, though its all new to Auckland.  Objectspace is not a dealer gallery, but all the work is for sale, just contact me directly.  See www.meliors.net for more details.

From the floor looking up, Spoil (foreground) and Opencast Auxtralia (background)

Granny Squares

I rarely do any stitching purely for personal purposes. It's so time consuming, and when I'm working on big art projects with deadlines it just doesn't make sense spend hours of stitching time crocheting myself a hat.  But sometimes I do make an exception for my most beloved darlings: especially my daughter, who had a birthday last month.

I've had granny squares on my mind for a while because a) they are quite fashionable so I keep seeing attractive photos of granny squares and b) they are fun and easy to crochet.  I'd love to make a vibrant multi-coloured granny square-something one day, but for Louise's elegant taste I restricted the palette to blue and grey. I knew she wanted a small blanket to keep her lap warm while studying in her cold Melbourne flat, and I hoped I could piece it together with op-shop wool because I was really broke.

I had the blue mohair, and some bits of grey wool already in my stash and I became a determined searcher of op shop wool baskets for a few months.  It was only as I came to sewing up the squares that I completely and utterly ran out of wool and had to go buy a whole skein new.  It was surprisingly difficult to find a warm grey in a light weight even once I broke down and started looking at yarn shops as well as second hand. Apparently no one makes hand knit boys school uniform jerseys anymore.

Yummy Yellowcake

Yellowcake

I sort through bags of yarn passed on by a family friend clearing out her craft stash.

Ugly yellow acrylic sits on top of my reject pile while I'm telling my mother about the book I'm reading, Uranium: war, energy and the rock that shaped the world by Tom Zoellner.

I've been thinking about how I could make nuclear power or a radiation leak for a long time, at least since the Japanese tsunami.  That's where my thinking about clouds started before veering off into Dispersant.

Yellowcake, I say to mum, such an innocuous word. Yellowcake is the standard form for safely transporting uranium over long distances from mine to enrichment plant to be converted to fuel pellets for nuclear power plants.   The yellow yarn glows at the edge of my vision.

I sneak the yellow yarn into the bag of wool I'm taking home with me.  The yellow is too bland in its brash brightness. I dye hanks of it in tea, taking some out in minutes, leaving others in overnight so that now I have five subtle shades looking more interesting all together.

I've been thinking about stitching mines straight into plinths and blank stretched canvases.   I can try it out with my ugly yellow wool on the little square canvases in my cupboard.  I start sketching scrabbly and powdery piles and films and cakes of dust.

Couching

How will I stitch my yellowcake? I need a whole new technique.  I get another book off the shelf, The Art of Embroidery by Francoise Tellier-Loumagne seeking inspiration and find it in couching.

I have never couched before, but I don't read the directions, I just look at the photo for a while and then I do it. Which is usually how I figure out new stitches. Why is it so easy for me to learn textile craft techniques and so difficult to learn other useful things like science or accounting or colour theory?

A scattering of uranium

Making Many

A new project in memory of the 29 miners who died inside Pike River Coal Mine two years ago and whose bodies still lie buried in the dangerously gassy tunnels, to the great distress their families.

I'm making 29 of these mounds, small versions of Spoil which was also about coal mining. I've completed six so far. I can make one in a day which makes a nice change from my other long slow projects.  

My thoughts as I stitch these pieces are less about environmental impacts and more about the social costs of mining, one of the most dangerous industries in the world.  An estimated 5000 miners die in Chinese coal mines every year.  Over history, New Zealand has had several mining disasters which have reverberated widely through our small population.  The lies that communities are told about the wealth that mining will bring to locals must be cold comfort to families grieving for their men or caring for loved ones disabled by the job.  The imperative for mining companies to return increasing profits for shareholders is too often at the expense of safety.

Its a sad somber project but also very peaceful to work on. It fits on my lap and there are no tricky design problems to solve. Just the soothing steady push of needles into wool and through blanket.   I turn to this work for relief from the challenges of my other more technically demanding projects and gradually the collection grows.

Last glimpse of the back

One of my projects at the moment is tidying up the back of Just a Little Spill. This involves fitting a backing cloth mostly to help bear the weight so that that the hand embroidery at the top is doesn't tear from the pressure of four kilos of blankets hanging below.  As usual I'm quite fond of the back of my work and like to document it before it disappears.    

The other job is blanket stitching a line or two on the back around the whole circumference, to try and keep the wayward black roving in check. My felting is pretty loose on this piece and it has a tendency to shed black fluff from the bits not held down with blanket stitch.

Just a Little Spill is so big (2.5m x1.5m) that its all but impossible for me to work on in my tiny studio.  My friends Bethwyn and Steven are very kindly letting me come round and use their large living room to spread Just a Little Spill out and work on these finishing touches.

Just a little challenging

Me and Just a Little Spill (to give you a sense of scale)

Last week, in a mad rush to finish the stitching on my big black oil spill, I spent ANZAC Day sitting on my bed embroidering for 12 solid hours.  As I stitched I watched the entire fourth series of Mad Men on DVD on my laptop.  I enjoyed Mad Men very much. I finished Just a Little Spill which was very good. And I fried my laptop which was very bad.

The mad rush to finish Just a Little Spill was due to tomorrow's deadline to submit an online entry for it to the National Contemporary Art Awards.  An online entry requires one to have a computer and right now I don't have one.  Thanks to my mother letting me use her Macbook I have been able to submit the entry in time but its been extremely stressful to prepare.

Thankfully I'd already organized with photographer Craig Brown for him to photograph Just a Little Spill in his big studio. I found Craig online and chose him because he is the only local photographer who specializes in photographs of things (like cars) rather than people. He was an excellent choice, not only because he had the space and all the gear to manage my enormous black on black on grey, very difficult to photograph, work, but because he is very patient and experienced.  I'm so pleased with the pictures he took for me. Since I didn't have access to my own photos or Photoshop it was a great relief to have such a good full image that a detail view wasn't really necessary.

I've ordered a new desktop computer which will be more impervious to my studio's constant cloud of blanket dust (the original source of the overheating problem that after a year finally fried the laptop beyond repair).  My computer guy thinks he'll be able to retrieve about 95% of my data from the laptop, which will hopefully fill the two month gap since my last backup (let this be a cautionary tale that makes you do a back up right now!).  With luck, I'll be back online at home within the next few days.

Dispersant

View of Dispersant through the window from the ally. It doesn't photograph well because of the reflections. But its lovely in real life so if you can go, please have a look.

I installed Dispersant at the Outeredge Project at Sanderson Gallery last week and I'm really pleased with how its turned out.  But there is no chance to rest on my laurels or even have a cup of tea and a lie down. I'm running out of time to finish my big black oil spill and my Tui mine in time for their near deadlines, so I'm stitching even more constantly and certainly more frantically than usual.  So, not much blogging over the next little while.

Me on a plinth in the window installing

To keep you entertained click through to read two essays that accompany Dispersant. Fiona P. McDonald, an anthropologist has written a very erudite analysis, and I've got my own essay/artist statement.

Side view by day

Fiona writes: Experiencing Dispersant through the gallery window as though through the optic
lens of a microscope highlights the need for focused— rather than dispersed—accountability and an 
understanding the interconnectedness with unseen environments. This installation offers a new visualization and experience from which to negotiate alternative cosmologies in the aftermath of manmade environmental disasters. 

Side view by night

By the way, Dispersant is for sale, either as a complete work or as individual strands.. Please contact Sanderson Gallery if you are interested.

Tractorgirl interview

Julie Gibbons interviewed me and has posted an article about my work on her blog, Tractorgirl.  

Call and Response

The lovely Sculpture Park at Waitakaruru Arboretum has a new exhibition on for Autumn: call and response, curated by Kim Paton and featuring all early career artists. I walked around last week and really enjoyed myself. It is a very fun show with lots of playful interactive pieces.

Taarati Taiaroa's Site drawings involves borrowing a pair of scissors and buying an envelope printed with instructions for foraging from trees around the park.  I chose kahikatea and enjoyed sweet little red berries.

Grace Tai's Sound Hunt : Traces was even more fun with a treasure hunt  for brightly painted boxes hidden around the park, some making a doorbell noise to lead you to the others which had log books, postcards and photos to take in exchange for some small gift back. I made little origamis out of bright gum foil wrappers and took some lovely images home with me.

Another interactive piece was Amber Pearson's happiness tree and good luck gravel. Both demanded some energetic hard work on the hand pump to bring the sculptures up to standing.  This is me pumping up the happiness tree, always a worthwhile endeavour. Good luck gravel shed silver glitter as it grew and I didn't like it so much, perhaps also because of the large bush cockroach than ran out of its folds very close to my face.

Blankets featured in a couple of the pieces, the most successful I thought was this (untitled) by Karen Burns in which the folded blankets lined a large wooden box with a (replica) 1853 musket, a bible in Maori and some beer bottles.  The blankets were all folded with their lovely vintage labels showing, and since I have a thing about blanket labels I photographed each of them individually.

I'm fascinated by the industrial history of the gravel quarry that transformed the landscape at the site before it was planted up by the current owners, so I appreciated Ryan Monro's RIP Greywacke in which little boxes with a big chunk of gravel were scattered inconspicuously around the edges of the quarry.

At the bottom of the quarry Veronica Herber's Slowness Shifting II was a lovely subtle cascade of masking tape down the rocky cliff face and across the path.

Two of the artists I am most familiar with in the show were tucked into the shady forest edges.  I've seem many photographs of Nell Nutsford's Mould, erosions and extrusions but to see them in real life set in the landscape was a whole new experience.  As large glossy photos in a white gallery they seemed purely conceptual, but in among moss and lichens they seemed like they were a new kind of alien plantlife growing our of the gravel.

I met Ross Forbes last month at the opening of Sculpture and Object at Sanderson Gallery where we both had work.  Once again, his signature style was transformed away from the gallery into something much more organic.  With his shards of mirror reflecting foliage instead of walls, and the balance of ropes and weights seeming more precarious on a rocky hillside, and the whole thing covering a much bigger space, I found "clash crash bang" very beautiful and exciting.

There's lots of other work in the show that I liked, and very little that is predictable or boring.  If you are in the Waikato I'd recommend checking out this show before it finishes on 10 June.  I think it would be great to take children around and even people who aren't usually that interested in art would, I think find it stimulating.

The image at the top of the post is  part of a zombie woodland creature picnic, Antoinette Ratcliffe's Freeze Sucker.