Boy Workings revisited

A few people have asked me about the sculpture I made for Wheal Art Weekend in August (2006), so I thought I’d write a short piece to describe the thoughts behind the process of making it.

Boy Workings was made in response to a guided tour I had of some disused mine workings at Mount Wellington Mine, a few miles from here. A couple of men from a mine rescue team took a group of about 6 of us deep underground along narrow, abandoned tunnels. We trudged knee deep in water and ochre coloured mud through a disorienting labyrinth of tunnels, which were only dimly lit by our head torches. There was debris everywhere, including the remains of machinery, and we were often banging our heads on the tunnel roofs, which were collapsing in places, or clambering over fallen timber and stone. There were great shafts, now filled with water, and you could still see the cages that would have brought men up and down the various levels.

Some small tunnels were pointed out to us that were too small for adults to get in to, but had obviously been dug out because you could see tool marks on the wall and they went quite deep. The miners called them ‘boy workings’ because only boys of about 8 years old could have dug them out. This made me think about Kim, who’s also eight and what it must be like to send your child down into such appalling conditions, just to be able to put bread on the table.

Back at the mine buildings at South Wheal Frances (where the exhibition was held) I tried to connect the amazing architecture of the buildings with the reality of what went on under the surface. The Winding House, the building I was working in, had a cathedral like presence with a great long slab of concrete down the middle of it, like a bier or an altar (you get a sense of this in the picture on the right). I decided that I wanted to make a piece that would somehow put the human back into the space as it seemed completely absent to me. I wanted the body to be a shell, like the buildings, and used copper wire because that was what was originally mined at South Wheal Frances. I felt that a small, mummy-like shape in such a large space might reflect the feelings of vulnerability that I had underground, and decided to lay it out like a dead child on the ‘bier’. For me, this was like recognising that some children don’t have childhoods.

The bird came about for a number of reasons. In art history the bird is often used as a symbol of the soul, so putting the bird in the chest cavity was like giving the sculpture a soul; I put it roughly in the place of the heart, because that’s where most of us think the soul is. I liked the idea that this soul is dead because it reflects my feelings that there’s no such thing as a soul that lives on after death! The bird is a tiny fledgling, which is just what the child is and I wanted to make that link; it adds a kind of frailty and vulnerability to the sculpture. There was also the obvious symbol of the bird being trapped in its copper wire tunnel, like children would have been in the tunnels underground. One of the lovely things about the bird is that it moves about in the wind, adding a gentle movement to the piece. Visitors made some good observations and said it was like a little heart fluttering in the breeze, and they also made the connection with the fact that birds were used to detect for gas in the mines.

A sound piece, called Other Shores, accompanied the sculpture; if you listened hard you could hear the sound of a child breathing out the sound of birdsong. I’d liked to have made more of this but couldn’t because of lack of equipment and time (the usual things!).

I’m still finding it hard to understand the positive reaction I got to this work, to me it just seemed too simple! But perhaps that was what was good about it: it’s a small, uncomplicated thing that leads you to think about more complicated issues, leaving you to make up your own mind about how you feel about them.

A publication is being put together about the event and includes an unpublished essay by Megan Wakefield and a cd film of the event by artist Jacquie Orly. It should be ready in mid December 2006.

Follow this link to see more pictures of Boy Workings, and this one to see work made by other artists on site Level 2.