Bodies of Extraction is a project that starts from my preoccupation with exploring and subverting a materiality that is entangled in extraction and violence. Drawing instruments are mediums that themselves expose the relationship between the extraction and distribution of a mineral, as well as the use of it by the human body. I am exploring the potential of coal, as well as what it can register when the human body comes into the process.
On the 20th of November 2022, I travelled to the Margam Opencast Coal Mine, near Cefn Cribwr, Wales. I found an abandoned wound, now recovering and being taken over by all kinds of vegetation, from which I extracted rocks in order to draw with them. The images exposed here are the embodiment of the relationship between this black rock, white paper and myself.
I made an abstraction of different conditions of traditional coal mining which are: descending underground, into narrow spaces with lack of natural light, in order to break rocks that are going to be distributed. I performed these five steps by printing the stone on paper, as a personal exploration of the bodies, both geological and human, associated with the paradoxical process of extracting materials, which destroys and deteriorates the land, in order to make a material used for creative and expressive purposes.
