These Ghosts of Mine
Silverton, Colorado is a former mining town high in the Rocky Mountains. It was dangerous work to extract silver and gold from deep mines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The mines were exhausted long ago, but the legacy of death due to mine hazards, cold exposure, disease, and addiction remains today. Detritus—historical artifacts—still remain outside abandoned mines, testaments to the human toll exacted to satisfy the need for precious metals.
These Ghosts of Mine uses a discarded miner’s candleholder to deposit soot onto hand-embossed paper. Before electric light could be used in the mines, these candleholders were embedded in rock walls to cast minimal light during dangerous excavation work. I laid paper over various artifacts of the Silverton mining period—ore, industrial scrap, mine waste materials, and headstones—to produce embossed relief patterns. The soot casts shadows on the relief, revealing the remnants of hazardous labor using a tool from that same era.
Series of fumage drawings, soot on paper.
Produced at The Residency Project, Silverton, CO, 2024.
