Photo Series
Archival Pigment Prints
2018
Open-pit brown coal mine / Tagebau Inden, Germany
Shot inside an open pit coal mine in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, the photographs construct a landscape of geological artifacts combined with plastic building materials. The building materials are used to obscure and fragment the landscape, much in the same way the landscape of the mine was cut and abstracted by heavy machinery and the movement of huge amounts of earth. The plastics segment the frame, create artificial backdrops, or filter the image in bright construction-zone orange, distorting the depicted landscape.
The use of plastic building materials suggests the gridded patterns used in cartography, architectural drawings, and geological surveying for natural resource extraction. By using industrialised plastics to cut, abstract, and filter the landscape of the open pit mine, the photographs fabricate a new geography composed of natural and constructed elements.
