Fieldwork – Northern France 2024

In northern France, I undertook fieldwork across the vast slag heap mounds of the former coal-mining regions. These sites appear as inverted landscapes: places where what was once buried underground has been turned outward and reshaped into new, unintended mountains.

Walking these heaps became a form of research. I gathered fragments, observed textures, and considered how industrial waste slowly transforms into terrain. The mounds function as material archives, layered with histories of labour, extraction, and ecological regrowth.

 In my practice, slag is a residue. It is a remnant of consumption, produced through intertwined histories of imperialism and extraction. What was discarded becomes landscape. What was considered waste becomes horizon.

This work connects to my research in Australia, where extraction produces different but related forms of altered and unsettled ground. The Australian quarry, carved into emptiness, stands as a counterpoint to the French terril built from accumulation. Together, they reveal two expressions of the same process: landscapes shaped by taking.

 These sites inform my concept of haunted matter. Residue is not fixed or contained but permeable, able to move, seep, and re-form through new ecologies and plant life. The slag heaps demonstrate how the consequences of extraction continue to act in the present. What appears inert is in fact restless, continually transforming.

The fieldwork affirmed a central concern of my practice: that nothing truly disappears. It lingers, shifts, and returns in new forms.