AMD Paintings

2013-2014

The goal in my artwork has long been to explore and understand the relationships, in a metaphysical sense, between the natural environment, human existence and my place within it. Using acid mine drainage sludge, collected locally, to produce this body of work has become a means for me to connect, to bare witness and concede responsibility for my place in this time and space.

The painting process, as organic and changing as the medium itself, allows me to work from a point of immediate expression. Covering the canvas with varying amounts of wet sludge and iron oxide dust results in great deal of unpredictability, as the final manifestation emerges only hours later. The crackling texture of the ferric oxyhydroxides on the canvas conveys a sense of topography and symbolizes the landscape impacted by AMD. I like to think of these paintings as an invitation to take part in an intimate conversation with the landscape; a memorial to those lands that have been purged in an effort to sustain our own existence.