Justina Alexandroff

This exhibition piece is a three-dimensional graphic representation of an ex-colliery in the Southwest of England. The area, Somerset, has a long history of coal mining but these sites have been reclaimed by vegetation, seeming to merge back into the topography of the landscape. The word autographic means self inscribing and the project explores the earth’s surface as a visual inscription of practices of extraction, an autographic visualisation of coal and its ecological and cultural expression through time.  At a time when we need to be moving away from fossil fuel based energy - yet a deep coal mine can momentarily receive the green light by the UK government - we can look to ecological expressions of this material as a new insight into the nature and extent of human interaction with the ground beneath our feet. Coal as a resource can be newly understood through the waste piles that were formed in the process of its material extraction: spoil heaps.

The publication, ’Reaping the Spoil’, catalogues the material traces at the site. It acts as a manual, a conceptual map that takes you through a story of abandoned coke ovens to a medicinal plant called herb bennet. In this way the user becomes a cultural extractor with material traces being a gateway into a broader expression of coal and its interconnections

I created materials through altering appropriated geological matter from the spoil heap, hoping to physicalise the experience of colliery waste, embedding its ‘cultural worth’ into objects that translate across planes of bodily sensation.