I thank you light,
for the subtle way
your merest touch gives shape
to such things I could
only learn to love
through your delicate instruction.
David Whyte, extract from The Bell and the Blackbird, 2018

There are small reasons for hope. Hope that humanity will work its way through global warming. Hope that the burning of Permian assets can be finalised via new technology. Hope that our descendants will have a life with comfort as we have lived ours.

From the carcass of Liddell Power Station, I collected furnace-fire flue-gas dust.  The fine light-grey powder is a toxic concentration of residues of coal burnt to power turbines and generate electricity for homes and industry.  Hope is always present: as I experiment with light (electrons generated from the power station) and the materiality of flue gas dust, I think about how the operation of Liddell has gifted me with comfort and safety.

I chose to work with the domestic form of a bowl that traditionally speaks of sustenance and warmth, of food shared with kindness and generosity. By encasing toxic flue gas dust in resin, Blessings for the Light seeks to enact the transfiguration of what is poison, into beauty. It asks us to remember that what was cast out as waste, is still Country to be respected. As light dances around the edges and illuminates the corners of this work, small blessings escape. Maybe you might catch one.

A multi panel drawing Internal Structure, completed on 15 April 2023, is a reminder to me of the alternate reality of an hour drawing using all my senses. Heat sucked moisture out of every pore. Vibrations tried to capture my heartbeat.  Noise was overwhelming, even with my earplugs in as tight as they could go. The floor shook. Lights cast an eerie, haunted glow. There was the sound of running water and the grinding of metal. My boots began to slip on the greasy floor. If you sniff the drawing’s paper, it still smells of that slippery, greasy floor and of the sulphurous air inside Liddell Power Station.

My unease with this extraordinary environment also inspired a short speculative fiction title – Read Before Operating.