The mines at Sorsk is an installation comprised of traditional and contemporary practice, including screen print, bronze casting, moving image, and welding. This work concludes my undergraduate fine art degree at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Experiencing a landscape via imaging technologies, that surpass human sensorial access, continues to lie at the heart of my practice as I explore relationships between images and the physical terrain. I am fascinated by the multitude of perspectives on digital platforms but have become increasingly attentive towards the perceptions of touch and the dialogues that unfold from an individual’s interaction with tangible material; from its colours and textures, to its source and history. In my palm sits a rock, a fragment of a landscape sampled from an open pit mine in Sorsk, Russia. It has travelled from Siberia to my current studio space, enabling me to directly coalesce a distant site. 

I focus on the open pit mine to visually analyse this landscape and thus its status in today’s climate. Sorsk is one of many to disrupt the appearance of the surface, which resulted from extraction processes of valuable ores contributing to economic development and urbanization. The infamous carvings within the terrain appeal to the aesthetics of destruction in the form of huge unnatural curves that withdraw into the depths of the land. Ground level photography, virtual map data from Landsat 8, and satellite imaging from Google Earth, has enabled investigations into the structures of the pit and the ores within.