Coalface, 2024

The sculpture Coalface consists of a thick piece of sliced anthracite coal that has been polished into a mirror, projecting a lightness that contradicts its apparent mass. Approaching it, the viewer encounters an uneven surface, the ripples of which are reminiscent of a fun-house mirror, distorting reality. An otherworldly presence, Coalface is at once earthly and uncanny, impen­etrable yet bottomless. Though the discovery of coal as a form of energy was irrevocably transformative, accel­erating us toward a techno-industrial future that has long since lost the hopeful promise it once seemed to hold, it is here rendered solely as a tool for reflection. Lit mysteriously by an oil lamp, the flame of which is never directly visible, the warped imagery which appears reveals our emotional disconnect from the natural world and our struggle to recognize ourselves in the materialities that embed us. This discreet arrangement enacts a subtle yet crucial tension—between fuel and combustion, between the combustible and its flame.

The fire, withheld yet present, per­forms on the skin of the coal, drawing together the paradox of a material that is at once the promise of energy and the threat of its own undoing. Through this confrontation by our own likeness imposed upon the fossil fuel  we are asked to question our own complicity with it.

In the process, Coalface also reflects the complex relationship between human beings and the geological, where since our concep­tion we have sought meaning in and through stone, from cave paintings to the black volcanic glass of obsidian used to gaze into other realms, and now into the screens of our iPhones, animated by the necessity of mining rare earth metals. Coalface thus foregrounds coal as a vehicle for both accelerationism and entrapment, the economic power of which is almost magnetic and can seemingly twist our view of the world, while also showing how humankind, in our pursuit of such fossils, contorts the planetary timeline, unearthing buried strata of coal, petroleum oil, and natural gas—ransacking the past to fuel the present. An act which, if left unhin­dered, might jeopardise the human future.