HILARY MINES INDUSTRIAL HISTORY AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WALES
Back from a flying trip to Wales to install TIN WORKS in the National Museum of Wales on Swansea Waterfront.
In the past few years I‘ve worked on portraits of and projects with demolition workers, miners and container ship crews - faces and stories etched into roofing zinc, exposed onto weathered corten steel or embedded in stone. The images are created through chemical, physical transformations and destructions. People, materials, places and politics are interwoven and geology and imagination are overlaid in the sediments and scars of our lives.
Most recently the periodic table ouija has moved over ‘Sn’ for TIN guiding me to family histories and contemporary realities of what was once ‘Tinopolis’ in South Wales. Reinvigorating the tradition of artists in residence in nationalised coal and steel industries I approached, and was welcomed, into the last Tin Works in Llanelli and worked with the tinplate they produce there as tin can pinhole camera and with early tintype photographic techniques.
The museum tells the story of industry and innovation in Wales and my work is aptly in asection of the museum focused on ‘A Day’s Work’ – foregrounding the people behind theproduction, the invisible labour, the never-ending maintenance work behind any industry and the power of these collective labour movements. Absorbing bits of the museum as I moved back and forth through it with trolley loads satisfied my long term obsession with the precipitous history of materials and metals and the contentious contexts of labour,communities, extraction and exploitation. What happens to communities after coal? when ‘terroir’ becomes toxic? When the elements that built the modern world - or the processes that extract and transform them - need to transform themselves - when we need to stop extracting ancient sunlight?
I’m drawn to the geological maps, marking the spot of my origins - societies built on coalfields, smelting and steel. My grandfather was the only one of his many brothers who ‘escaped’ tin – training as an optician and working into his 70s travelling miles by bus every day to treat the mining communities of Maesteg. I‘ve been entrusted with the remains of his optical tools - magnifiers and glass eyes that I pair in my mind with other precious cargo - John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ - a key primer of my Fine Art degree and the consolidation of the vision that hasn’t erred since mute teenage years. That art was labour, that it could have potent value in the world - creating ways of seeing and thinking and making that could invoke action and make change. In many ways I am a million miles from the Powells and Parrys (made very apparent when I turn up in the small town where my ancestors are buried to seek out the last pair of specsavers special edition Vivienne Westwood tartan sunglasses - that oppressive Presbyterianism could do with a bit of punk!).
Much to shake off without looking back. Much to build on - mutual respect for working hands and minds, intimate connections with materials and land. Mutual respect wasn’t there the morning I installed the show. My photographic works on tinplate (suprisingly fragile despite being made of metal) had been trodden on by a cleaner – not just an accidental toe mark - stomping great footsteps over most of the works ready for hanging - a chair placed on top of one of them and cleaning fluid corroding their images. My heart sunk to the pit of my stomach. I felt numb. Travelling miles on low budgets, committed to pulling projects off in pressurised conditions.
Ironically my labour and the value of the work of art made with and dedicated to those often overlooked was violated in a space where you might expect labour and the value of art to be a given. It never is. It’s almost a hurt I want to hide but maybe is important to say - something about recognising other people’s value not literally walking all over people’s souls through blinkered bitterness.
ENERGY. LAND. METALS. COAL. NETWORKS. TRANSFORMATIONS. FRONTIERS. The signs in the museum make the connections for me as I think through our work building the POWER STATION and the challenges of taking practical action to both create new infrastructures (quite literally street by street but also, more critically in the imagination) and destroy the old – fossil capitalism. Of everything involved in this - rethinking our relationships with energy and materials, reconnecting with land, transforming our societies – facing these frontier times. And if there’s one thing the museum of industry and innovation makes clear - it’s that big changes happen fast, that society adapts rapidly and that an energy transition needs to be built on justice for people and planet – but more specifically place – respect for places – the sites of extraction, of people’s local, embedded knowledge, of layered histories and intricate politics and poetry of the land we have the privilege to inhabit for our short lives. I’ve been thinking a lot of what this might mean – of what replaces the labour songs, of the power of the fossil imagination over our culture, of my ancestors and of being an ancestor and what this means for the actions we all take now.
And perhaps this quick trip across the magical, musical feat of engineering that I refuse to call the ‘Prince of Wales’ bridge induced a spot of ‘hiraeth’ - an untranslatable blend of nostalgia and deeper longing for something lost and maybe never known, something not yet here? Something of the Gramsci quote – ‘the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born – now is the time of monsters.’ Here be monsters (and maybe dragons too) but also here be many people working to make something better together every day and having a break in the courtyard of what was once a warehouse on Swansea’s industrial docks I look out on a literal beehive and the hive of activity that is the community garden called ‘Graft.’ To graft - to work, to make resilient, to repair, to write and grow a new story.
Thank you to Peter O’Donnell for tintype collaboration and expertise, David Drake for support from the start with Ffotogallery, National Museum of Wales and Trostre Tin Works and to Calverts cooperative printers and Phil Snare for work on the tin can reproduction labels. Hope to work with you more as I plot a book and film.
