Hive / Andamooka

Opal mines have long been a fascination for me - always in outback locations and arid country they represent a really fascinating study into the human re-shaping of the environment.

They turn the land into this incredible patchwork of holes and mounds, vast fields of ochre and white piles of dirt, and of course miner’s camps, diggers, trucks and roads. The lives people live there are often incredibly hard, but the hunt for opal brings many rewards, beyond the financial - a life lived in alignment with the minerality of opal, the conditions of its formation and its irridescent glow.

This project consists of still images from 3D scans of the opal mine tailings around Andamooka, in outback South Australia. The images are rendered as point-clouds, and show the remarkable tortured landforms that have evolved through many years of opal mining. The landscape here is a “natureculture”, a terraformed planet with its own sublime beauty. In the tailings are canyons and mesas, towering cliffs and sudden falls – here rendered as dynamic and gauzy forms.

I can’t help but think of Andamooka as a kind of unacknowledged Australian land-art movement, as if a whole group of people decided to dedicate their lives to re-shaping the surface of the Earth and used opals to fund their obsession. What kind of expression is this, to have produced such convolutions in topography as a creative impulse?

Because the scans are worked with in a 3D environment, we can fly the virtual camera around, under, over and through the images, revealing bizarre and unexpected details of the landscape. We also see how tortured it is, the furrows, scars and weirdly dramatic humps formed by sifting through rock for precious minerals. Because the 3D scan captures imagery sometimes down a way into the mine shafts, we can see a landscape that kind of continues underground.