The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences houses “a growing collection of more than 1.5 million rocks, fossils and minerals from across the world, and meteorites from much further afield. Gathered over more than 350 years, they have huge historical and scientific value, and are used by researchers and students from across the world. Notably, the collections include the rocks collected by Charles Darwin during the voyage of HMS Beagle, the founding collection dating back to the 1680s, the John Watson Building Stone collection, and the Harker petrology collection” (Hide, 2024). The works developed by the Heavy Water Collective entangle the weight of geological temporalities with untold human histories; holding subjects such as folklore and the problematic legacies of empire in a scientific context to re-categorise the world through the wealth of artefacts held in the Sedgwick museum and archives.
Temporalities: Heavy Water Collective and the Sedgwick Museum Cambridge
Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
52.2029635,0.1220771
William Smith
William Smith was a geologist and canal engineer who developed the first ever geological map of Britain in 1815. A copy of his book ‘Strata Identified by Organised Fossils’ from 1816, is housed in the Special Collections at the University of Leeds, and I was very happy to find an original copy of the 1815 map on display at the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge.
Looking at a map that charts what lies beneath our familiar network of manmade roads and cities has marked a huge shift in my understanding of landscape — and its exploitation — and seeing this important piece of history in the collection was a key element in bringing this research together. The dark grey area is coal, and it lies across a large swath of the county of Yorkshire, where I hold a deep sense of belonging.
My Geological Map
I was born in Staincliffe Hospital in Dewsbury, which is built on the site of an old Coal Mine. I grew up in Shaw Cross, which is also above a coal mine, and close to Gawthorpe, where my dad grew up and where Coal Carrying championships still take place every year even though the industry is long since gone. One of my early memories from Shaw Cross is being ushered out of the primary school building to the roadside, so that we could all wave at Margaret Thatcher as she travelled past in the back of a black car – I remember the shape of her hair and her hand waving back from behind the glass. I didn’t know how divisive and politically charged this ‘drive-by’ was at the time.
This photograph was taken from the carpark of a pub called the Reindeer Inn, where I started working as a kitchen porter when I was 13 years old. The National Coal Mining Museum is on the Caphouse Colliery site, which was sunk in an area where coal had been mined from shallow pits since 1515. Two shallow coal seams outcrop in the area, the Flockton Thin and the Flockton Thick. The Flockton Thick was worked by James Milnes who leased the mineral rights from Mary Wortley, the Countess of Bute in 1778 — thus making this the oldest existing mine shaft in the country.
Interconnections
There are many interconnections between different sites I have visited in this research project.
For example, the Corycian Cave situated close to Delphi in Greece is famous as a site of the oracle in Greek mythology. This cave was thought to be the meeting place between a group of local women and Gaia – goddess of the Earth. These women, later referred to as Pythia as the site and the myth developed, would sit above a chasm in the earth and become intoxicated with vapours that seeped out of the rock before delivering prophecies to their local community.
This divine connection with the earth became well known, according to Greek myth. In the 10th Century BC, Apollo – god of reason – killed the serpent that protected the sanctuary of Gaia to overthrow her and establish his seat at what was believed to be the centre – or the navel (omphalos) — of the world. In memory of the slain serpent and Gaia, a woman was chosen to be his oracle and the term Pythia was adopted to describe this female role.
In 7th Century BC the first temple was built on the site, and for over 1000 years the Pythia – who were all local women — were consulted by leaders across the globe, who travelled to Delphi in search of answers that would shape and define global politics and society for centuries. The real power at the temple of Apollo was held by the priests however, who ‘interpreted’ the words and sounds that came from the Pythia positioned above a cleft in the ground.
Hogberget Cave
In February 2023 I travelled to the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland to locate the Hogberget Cave – another cave known locally as the ‘womb of the earth’ due to its unusual uterus-shaped formation. There are many caves across the world that are referred to as ‘wombs’ due to their shape, and many have been used as sites of ritual and pilgrimage. What I like about the caves I have visited is their charged power; they are natural openings that enable us to be enveloped by the earth for a duration of time, to be protected from the changeability of the world above and to be encased in the darkness that defines them.
Entering this cave did indeed evoke notions of birth canals and material transformations explored in earlier works. A product of deep time, the form of this cave offers new potential readings in relation to female subjectivity and bodily becomings in the context of artistic practice. This trip was funded with an a‑n bursary and was a joint expedition with Flis Holland, a Finnish artist who works with meteorites, uterine tumours and trans politics. The affect that this formation had has subsequently fed in to the research and development for this project.
Artifical Caves of Yorkshire
Interestingly, the ecology of mines is recognized as cave fauna by biospeleologists (Biologists who study cave biology). Mines are, effectively, artificial cave-like habitats for organisms that dwell there. Mines are forced openings in the earth, rather than naturally occurring ones — fissures in the landscape forcefully sunk in order to garner their mineral wealth.
For me, there is something evocative about thinking about this violent action, specifically in relation to the Pythia and the vapour-induced connections they originally had with Gaia — goddess of the Earth — in the Corycian cave. Capitalist extraction is fused with mythologies in this research to generate new stories of disturbance, agitation, extraction and prophecy in relation to the geology beneath our feet – which in my case is coal and the post-industrial landscapes of which I am a part.
This is a view down one of the shafts at Caphouse Colliery, Wakefield. This deep cylindrical pit is a connecting space between the surface of the earth and the coal seams below — a space in which light turns to dark, in which the uncertainties of climate change become static as the atmosphere below remains constant and unchanging. It is a tunnel that, metaphorically, leads to the materiality of Gaia. In the works developed, she is perhaps present in the black mineral that has been exploited in order to power the industries that have transformed the landscape, its people and its politics over the decades and centuries. The tunnels, drifts and absences that run below Yorkshire are extremely present in my mind, and I think of what might be unearthed through playful processes of dwelling and channeling, as a manifestation of the Pythia in Yorkshire.
This project draws on the mythologies that connect me as a woman artist to the earth, through the material qualities of coal and its absence, so that resulting artworks construct and present an agent of prophecy in the face of an ecological crisis through storytelling, embodiment, ritual and myth.
Serpentine Connections
In reference to late capitalism and the resulting climate emergency, the ouroboros is recontextualised in my work as an ancient symbol that warns of a time in which humans move towards their own destruction. In the context of this research, this retelling of the symbol becomes a marker for the rebirth of the earth without us. With this work, I recontextualize the ouroboros and the serpent more generally as a warning sign of the world to come for humans, rather than maintaining its intended purpose as a symbol of the cosmological unity of all things.
In ancient Egyptian mythology, the ouroboros is an embodiment of the lower region of the cosmos that bears an intimate relationship to the darkness of the underworld. In Greek mythology, Python was the serpent living at the center of the Earth, believed by the ancient Greeks to be at Delphi. The snake is thus a cave dwelling protector of Earth.
Also inspiring is the scaled creature that appears out of the darkness in Odilon Redon’s 1896 depiction of Oannes, an amphibious being borrowed from Mesopotamian mythology. The title reads ‘I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate form’. Haunting and strangely beautiful, this etching speaks of a reckoning, in which a new wisdom re-shapes both the world and human’s position in it. I included this etching in the PostNatures exhibition in the Graves Gallery.
Interestingly, the fossilised remains of ammonites were given the name snakestones in England, because they resemble coiled snakes turned to stone. Museum palaeontologist Dr Paul Taylor, who has an interest in fossil folklore says, ‘Stories about snakestones came primarily from two places where ammonites are very common and easy to find: Whitby in Yorkshire and Keynsham in Somerset’ (Bassett, 1982). Early map maker William Camden mentioned the peculiar formations in his book Britannia, which was published in 1586: ‘If you break them you find within stony serpents, wreathed up in circles, but eternally without heads’ (Bassett, 1982).
This project draws from different interconnected sources, including my own identity as a woman living above the extracted coal seams that fuelled the industrial revolution while a global climate crisis unfolds.
Coal Queens
These small statuettes were used in rituals, as offerings to Gaia and the Pythia. They are held in the archeological museum at Delphi.
In addition to this, there are lots of interesting connections with Delphi’s Pythia and Coal Queens. The Coal Queen pageant was a tradition that ran until the 1980s within mining communities across the country. Coal Queens could be the wife, sister or daughter of pit workers and would be crowned each year at local miners’ picnics or carnivals, and the winners would represent the National Coal Board at events across the globe.
In the National Coal Mining Museum collection there are also a series of evocative coal carvings of women made by coal miner Allan Armstrong – which in the context of this artwork are re-contextualised as sacred artefacts or offerings (Courtesy of Allan Armstrong and family and the National Coal Mining Museum). There is also reference in the works developed to Dorcas, a female spirit who was said to speak to miners deep underground. Thus, the work draws on mythic and cosmological interrelations between sacred sites and sacred bodies, via artefacts found in ancient and contemporary cultures and through materiality, site and nature.
These small statuettes were used in rituals, as offerings to Gaia and the Pythia. They are held in the archeological museum at Delphi.
Landscapes are in a constant state of flux; nothing is static and unchanging. Fossils and minerals found by miners in the coal seams of South Yorkshire illustrate geological time transformation, as remnants of prehistoric ferns and trees remind us that Sheffield was once a tropical rainforest in the Carboniferous Period. What can we learn about ourselves through these earthly apparitions?
Openings
Experimental processes seek to mimic the digital skins of LiDAR scans / 3D virtual models. They represent forms found in mine shafts and cave openings, and are made of jesmonite and coal dust. I’m interested in manifesting these data sets through sculpture and the misplacement of that – so the real is digitized, and then translated again in to form – much like the photographic processes I developed in earlier works.