BIG COAL
Creative Statement – BIG COAL
I am making large scale charcoal and pastel drawings of chunks of black anthracite coal. This combustible sedimentary rock made primarily of carbon forms when plants and animals die and are compacted by natural forces and heat over eons. The works are literally big with the subject represented objectively while suspended in neutral fields of gray within the closed picture plane. The size of the pieces emphasize the fractal nature of rocks and geological landscapes bestowing an ambiguous space and form for viewers to contemplate. The drawings are primarily created by adding charcoal - another manifestation of carbon made from once living organisms - and then subtracting it from the substrate via erasure so the images are extracted from pictorial space just as coal is mined from its hidden underground space.
These drawings are also big in a figurative sense. Coal has a myriad of cultural and political connotations connected to it and makes a controversial fulcrum for contemporary political discourse. As a cheap readily available source of energy, coal made modern industry and its economic benefits possible. In Wyoming, the state I have called home for close to twenty years, coal is a big deal since its extraction provides jobs, generational wealth, and a sense of identity and purpose to individuals and families while also facilitating a tax base that funds essential public infrastructure. At the same time, coal is a big deal to life on the planet due to the threats of existential climate change and other consequences aligned with decades of burning fossil fuels. It seems remarkable to me that while “analog” mining for coal may be on the decline, the demand for energy is increasing to fuel “digital” mining for cryptocurrencies, blockchain, data centers, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. I find myself asking if carbon dioxide is any less ephemeral than Bitcoin, or a charcoal drawing for that matter?
I maintain a fascination with apophenia, the ability for the human mind to identify patterns in ostensibly random information, visual or otherwise. BIG COAL acts as something of a Rorschach test in which viewers comprehend the valence of the work depending on the individual perspectives they bring to the table. One audience may view these objects as a monument to the benefits of the coal industry while another may understand them as a timely critique of fossil fuels. While the pace of technological development speeds up, the process by which I make this work is about slowing down. I am afraid that the human animal cannot comprehend time scales in such a way as to avert crises. I hope that through acts of slower making and looking, my work might act as a catalyst for discourse between groups that often talk over and past each other.