Transcript
When I first looked at doing a project at Liddell, I was a bit hesitant because it is a big polluting power station. I was like, “Oh, do I actually want to be involved with this?” But my curiosity got the better of me, and I don’t like the idea of demonizing things just for the sake of it. So, I found it a fascinating thing to engage with. Really, at the end of the day, it’s just a big building that produces power. I’m trying to put the politics of it aside.
I’m Will Maguire, a blacksmith up here in Hunter Valley, outside of Branxton. I work with hot steel, making sculptures and doing architectural line work. I’m making some stuff for Liddell. We ended up doing some blacksmithing workshops with apprentices, operators, and people from the corporate side of things. Everyone was surprisingly unsentimental, which I was expecting a bit more of. Maybe it was the environment we were in.
We made a soup ladle during one of the workshops. It’s like an ash soup ladle made from the ash conveyor. This is flattened ash, and the bowl was formed from plates from the coal crushers. We got in there with a chisel, took off a bunch of these plates, dished the bowl, and used some funky mesh for the handle. I like making homey, mundane tools like soup ladles or kitchen knives from materials from Liddell.
A lot of the materials I got are specifically forgeable, so I can manipulate their shape and bring them to life. It might just be a pipe, a bit of bar, or a flat thing, and I’ll shape it into something with power or energy that speaks back to where it came from.
I’ve got all this material, like a sight glass from a boiler or an old wooden pattern, which is a wheel turning spinner. There’s a giant rattle gun, King Dick flogging spanners, which might have been a humorous prop to keep the guy’s morale up. I was looking for things with some sort of life to them. Part of the process is playing around with what I can get out of the material.
These are sections I’ve chopped in the bandsaw from repaired boiler tube sections. They were just scrap, and then I heated them up and flattened them. You get these really complex shapes coming out. There’ll be a lot of experimenting and seeing what the material does.
When we spoke last, I had gathered a whole bunch of stuff. I’ve been thinking a lot about materiality and the active nature of material with my other work. There’s a lot of that going on at Liddell. You go into this huge building, and there are these little people in Hi-Vis wandering about, pressing buttons and turning knobs, running this whole place. It’s like Gulliver’s Travels with the little Lilliputian people doing their thing. That stuck with me.
These are all bits and bobs from Liddell, and I’m obviously humanizing these bits of pipe. There’s the element of trying to bring these objects to life. Humor actually helps with that. There’s another group of works, the burn works, coming from a similar place. They’re also trying to capture this material energy. I used a lot of the parts, heated them up to temperatures similar to the big furnaces, and then burned them into plywood sheets. This left an imprint and ghostly, shadowy effects.
This is one of the pipe flanges from Liddell. The place is full of pipes—it’s like pipe flange heaven. This is one of the big spanners from the workshops there. As it burns, it creates fumes and smoke that stain the timber. Where the texture of the timber is, it leaves little white bits, almost like a sparkle or effervescence. I like that.
Part of the big issue here is the divisiveness of the politics. Getting all divisive, defensive, and combative between parties is never helpful. If we can see the humanity among us, we may be more likely to be productive. Humor can maybe help with that, and it steers me towards feeling that humor is okay for this project.
