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 so far 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.

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?

And that question of creative impulses behind the shaping of the environment, makes me start thinking about termite mounds, these incredibly large and elaborate environments the termites build to act as thermal regulation and gas exchange for their nest underground.

It’s like the environmental byproduct of termites building colonies is kind of like the environmental byproduct of opal mining, they are of the same type.

So I have slipped in a couple photos of termite mounds here as well, also 3D scans from mobile phone images I took while on holiday in the NT. They make for a nice visual comparison! And animating the camera around and through both of these landforms would add real drama to their relation. I think there’s something here…