Julie Massam

Contemporary Artist

Whispers from a Post Industrial Landscape

In early 2021 the UK went into lockdown again. The collective mood was one of anxiety and fear. There was no sense of how long this third lockdown would last, although hope was on the horizon in the knowledge that newly developed vaccines would ‘save the day’. As I adjusted to life in lockdown I took regular wintery walks along the cliff tops of West Penwith. The desolate beauty of the post industrial landscape around Levant drew me back again and again. I was frequently preoccupied by the stamina and hardship experienced in the tin mining areas here. The sense of collective suffering drew a parallel in my mind. The 21st century pandemic and the 19th and 20th century industrial toil.

Using various artefacts from the site, such as rocks, roots and small remnants from the tin mining era, I took a series of Turin prints from them using collected iron pigments to tone some of the sheets. Over the following months, until we emerged from lockdown, I embedded my mindset into the landscape at Levant and attempted to ‘connect’ with the Natural Framework to decipher the visual data that emerged. These are the results.