‘An Gwyth - the vein’
New This piece continues my larger body of work, Waste Burrows, exploring my Cornish heritage. My grandfather worked in the mines until they closed; he passed away before I began this course, and the money he left funded my master's at the RCA. This land holds a jagged history, centuries of contamination and economic growth sharing the same ground. That inheritance is not something I can step outside of.
Time spent in Kresen Kernow, the Cornish mining archive, shaped how I read the marks left by extraction. Witnessing how we claw under the skin of the earth. I aim to capture this by clawing into plaster, then casting those marks in Cornish clay, a metaphor for that process, asking what remains once value has been decided and taken.
The tin itself comes from a licensed producer in my village, whose father worked alongside my grandfather. He processes it using sand carried by storm erosion and machinery once used at Blue Hills mine, the only tin still made in Cornwall today.
Rather than shaping the tin, I let it shape the piece. I pour it molten onto the fractured forms, letting the metal find its own path through the break, bleeding through the cracks like a vein. My practice is material-led, built on dynamic movement and limited control; the physical process carries the meaning. The ruination is not finished; the mines' closing didn't end the damage, and neither does this piece resolve it.