Botallack mine, atop the cliffs of Penwith, has been my photographic subject for over 15 years. Its terrain holds traces of photography underfoot, where tin, copper, and arsenic were mined by men below. On the surface, the labour of women and girls, or bal maidens, was central to ore processing. They hammered, separated, and sieved ore, known as spalling, framing, and jigging. Despite their integral role in mining economies, their contributions are often erased in Cornwall’s patriarchal stories.

Metallophyte plants such as gorse, sea thrift, and heather cover the site, absorbing heavy metals from the industrial past into the soil. Just like the bal maidens, they sit on the surface, processing the extracted elements from below. Metallophyte bal maiden foregrounds the overlooked female labour within mining and wider extractive industries by appropriating the site in an image of itself.

The land is both collaborator and subject, engaging with its embedded stories through interactions with bodily, environmental and material forces. An embodied reading of the landscape is developed by shooting from the hip near the feminine sacral chakra, lying amongst metallophytes, and using them to filter the images. The interiors of engine houses are explored as a home of production, and a womb-like space, as an act of feminist reclamation within an extractive, male-dominated post-industrial terrain.

Photochemical alchemy processes provide a counterpoint to the precision of the darkroom, as metallophytes are brewed to use as developers for my medium format negatives. Hand-printing the images in my childhood kitchen, a domestic site of unseen labour, I use intensive exposure times and dodge with gorse, whilst stones create scratches and tints tracing the bal maidens’ work. The resulting images exist as both artefact and enquiry, surfacing the tensions between extractive labour, gender and landscape.

spalling/gorse/5 minutes framing/sea thrift/15 minutes jigging/heather/1 minute 50 seconds

silver gelatin prints dry mounted on mdf, 7 rocks from site all 20” x 24”