What others have touched, inhabited, used and left abandoned, are intriguing archeological montages that the photographer Eleanor Whiteman has interrogated through her series of photographs, 50 Pieces of Silver. Whiteman’s images survey the site of Tower Colliery, near Hirwaun in the Cynon Vallery in Wales. In the Thatcher government’s brusque shut down of Britain’s mining industry in the 1980’s, the coal board deemed Tower Hill, as it was formerly known, to be unprofitable and so it was earmarked for closure. Rescued from this fate by a number of its former miners, with the pooling of their redundancy money, the mine continued operating until 2008 when it became unviable as a deep mine. Tower Colliery has since been given a new lease of life as an open cast mine.
Whiteman, a former geology student who then studied photography, has been documenting Tower Colliery since 2009. What is striking about this body of work is how the lens reveals a certain intimacy set against the uncompromising parameters of the mine. The images don’t dwell on the familiar motifs of the mining industry but instead linger upon what may be considered as the more mundane and functional aspects of the workplace. The camera seeks out unusual juxtapositions of surfaces and objects. These are scenes of chaos and physical collapse; a wooden red frame gently bends at an angle as it comes away from a wall whilst a glass screen behind is violently punctured as though it is an air pocket relieving the thick atmosphere of the small office it once sealed. A plywood notice board stripped of communications has only the corners of former notices left behind stubborn staples. Moss green marks have clustered at the bottom of it, reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni painting from 1993. How many eyes have glanced at this board for insignificant snippets of information or details of the more radical finality of closure?
Whiteman’s lens, which moves between interior and exterior, is sensitive to spatial concerns. One moment we are presented with a squashed rusty gantry that is overpowered by the mountainous Welsh landscape in an almost anti picture postcard stance and then another image draws the eye seductively to a pierced metal sheet painted with yellow numbers. These have been applied in a rudimentary way, for practicality and efficiency. Yet there is a curious beauty to this handwritten sequence of numbers, with some overwritten and some scrubbed out. A heavy stripe of black and green paint procured from another job perhaps, has been hastily brushed on the metal sheet to provide a satisfying contrast for the yellow numbers. Practical and functional properties transmogrify through materials. Objects have become coded.
The workplace as a subject matter for visual investigation is fascinating, but there is a sharp contrast between those that are operational and those that are redundant. Mementoes of a workforce can be discovered in offices, factories, staff rooms, portacabins or the dashboard of white vans. These environments and arrangements of objects become imbued with a visceral quality when left in abandonment. Their presence determines the absence of a human in forensic detail, and to view these spaces becomes an almost voyeuristic act. In Whiteman’s images the viewer is allowed into restricted spaces, previously occupied by the Tower Hill workforce. We become witnesses to former activities and lives. Tim Edensor (2005) asserts that these abandoned spaces of former industry become
‘…charged with alternative aesthetic properties, they impose their materiality upon the sensory experience of visitors, and they conjure up the forgotten ghosts of those who were consigned to the past upon the closure of the factory but continue to haunt the premises. In these ways, ruined matter offers ways for interacting otherwise with the material world.’
This ruined matter is the refuse that persists and is never fully disposed of. Whiteman’s work contributes to a lineage of artists working with these ‘interactions’, and remnants of industrial decline from Bernd and Hilla Becher and Edward Burtynsky to projects such as Stuart Whipps’ Ming Jue which explores the loss of the Rover factory at Longbridge, W.Midlands and its wholesale removal to Nanjing, and artist Stephen Turner’s remarkable interiors of the Shivering Sands Seafort used for military purposes. These outputs are a cumulative surge of dramatic intervention into the sense of invincibility that industrialization has temporarily gifted us with. It is as if we are staring into the abyss of our own decline through the framing offered by these contemporary photographers and artists.
Whiteman’s images focus upon a specificity of such decline, pinpointing with precision, the interval between productivity and erasure of an industry. It is not the simple removal of a building or two; the community will bear witness to the changing site of Tower Colliery for years, its landscape even longer. This in-between stage is marked by an image of a checked shirt hung on a hook that tethers an old mirror, a latent piece of corporate efficiency realised in the fixtures and fittings. The shirt obscures the reflection of the mirror, hanging in absence of its owner. It seems a deliberate act that brings a physical veil over the end of the mine. Where it was once at the heart of the community, the mine is now slipping away in favour of more mobile, peripatetic modes of work. (Strangleman 2013) Yet it is stubborn and not hastily removed as Whiteman’s photographs bear witness to. Whilst the workforce has left, the fingerprints remain.
– text by Anna Falcini
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Edensor, T. 2005 Waste Matter – The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World Journal of Material Culture [e-journal] vol 10 no.3 pp 311- 332 Abstract only. Available through Sage Journals http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/10/3/311.short
Jones, S. ed., 2006. Seafort. Kent: The Seafort Project
Lingwood J., 2002. The Weight of Time. In: B.Dillon, ed. 2011. Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Art Gallery pp 109 – 118
Radnor, A., 2014. Big Picture: Cape Coral, 2012, by Edward Burtynksy. The Guardian Weekend 06.09.14 pp 8-9
Strangleman, T. 2013. Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory International Labor and Working Class History [e-journal] vol 84pp 23-37 Abstract Pm;u. Available through Cambridge Journals Online. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9137659&fileId=S0147547913000239
Stephen Turner, Seafort Project, 2005 [Online] Available at http://www.seafort.org/theproject.html {Accessed 10 September 2014}
Stuart Whipps, 2008.Ming Jue’[Online] Available at http://www.stuartwhipps.com/new-art-gallery-walsall.html {Accessed 8 September 2014}
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Text co-commissioned by Ffotogallery and Photomonitor as part of Wish You Were Here 2014 – Ffotogallery’s season of exhibitions and events foregrounding early career photography and critical writing.
Ffotogallery is the national development agency for photography and lens-based media in Wales. www.ffotogallery.org
For further viewing: www.eleanorwhiteman.wix.com
