Hive - work in progress

30/01/24
I’ve started work on a new project - it’s called Hive. It features images of termite mounds and opal mines - the white man’s holes and the white ants’ mounds.

I think the work is going to be a kind of science fiction, an absurdist investigation of the forces behind these incredible phenomena - the enormous industry of termites and the huge structures they build often metres in the air; the forceable terraforming of land around towns like Andamooka and Coober Pedy.

Opal mines have long been a fascination for me - they turn the land into this incredible patchwork of holes and mounds, vast fields of white, yellow and red piles of dirt, and of course miner’s camps, diggers, trucks and roads. The lives people live there are often incredibly hard - but they toil in pursuit of a beautiful thing, the opal prized by collectors around the world.

And equally, termite mounds are terrific in their variety, size, and ingenuity. In Australia, we have termite mounds widely across the top end, from Queensland across to the NT and WA. Some of them are vast and ancient, and their function as thermal regulation for the larger termite colony below the ground, is studied closely by scientists and designers to influence contemporary design decisions in the built environment.

This just seems to me to be an incredibly rich association, these two impulses to build and burrow. Perhaps we can learn something by putting their histories and driving principles together.

And in any case it will look amazing. Because these are not just any images - they are rendered as point cloud data, from a 3D drone scan of the areas. So far I’ve scanned some of the opal diggings at Andamooka, a town in outback South Australia. The results are just remarkable; because the scans are worked in Blender, a 3D environment, I 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. And because the 3D scan captures imagery sometimes down a way into the mine shafts, we can see a landscape that kind of continues underground.