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tell me I’m not going crazy

Like the internet can do so well, I’ve been journeying tonight. Generally I avoid TV but tonight among The Antique’s Roadshow and Mastermind I watched ‘Unreported World’ on C4. Here goes the route that I took online once I turned off the TV:

1. unreported world website

2. 2009 programme on burning coalfields in Bihar (India). Tells us how coal fields 360 km sq burn uncontrollably and that two years ago this area was forest and farmland. Now villagers live among the mines, children and adults work in the mines, and the government run coal mining organisation is planning a removal of 500,000 people from the area so they can get on with the businness of enriching India’s economy.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-worl…

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-worl…

3. comments on related blog ask for ways to help/ charities that may operate in this area

4. searching for this brings me to ‘Guernica’ online politics and art magazine.

http://www.guernicamag.com/art/1035/wasteland/

and a film made by Bombay Flying Club ‘Their recently-launched Wasteland project is a series of web documentaries about industrial pollution, and the story from Jharia is the first chapter of this ongoing project.’

5. another search brings me to “Snowdon Group” a consultancy to mining and exploration services, and their 2010 photography competition including photographs of the ill/poverty stricken miners of the burning coalfields in Bihar (Jharia region).

Am I really reading that this competition is “Celebrating the Mining Industry”? How exactly can the poor working practices that abuse the most basic of human rights depicted here be part of a celebration of mining??

They really need to think about their wording.

http://www.snowdengroup.com/SnowdenContent.asp?CID…

Tonight I’ve also been consumed by the truely celebratory stories in Chile.

mining… freedom from containment – the fascination for us public is how the 33 men kept their sanity (freedom of mind) through their imprisonment

mining… fire and ashes – free burning coal fields

mining… containment in poverty – villagers unable to move away from collasping land and scavenging for coal pieces


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The Littlest Print Exchange

This is the smallest print I’ve made – and the largest edition. It was a good discipline for me to get 50 small prints close to the same. Satisfying though. A fellow printmaker thought they looked like biscuits baking.

I’ll get 50, or its is 49? prints in return. It’ll be like all my christmases together!

This work ‘Fire under the Ashes’ is inspired by a blog posting on the Tehran bureau website. It was a captivating piece, made all the more so by the responses and comments from other readers. This is my response.

Fire under the Ashes is a Persian saying. I felt its a pertinent way to describe..

rebirth to change

tension of peace waiting

the tension between freedom and containment which is what my practise overall explores.


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