MINE PAINTINGS

Mining soil from former nitrate mines in the Atacama Desert on canvas, 100 x 150 cm each, 2022.

The “Mine Paintings” were created in former nitrate mines in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Their making follows the extractive logic of the mines themselves: material is taken directly from the ground, gathered from residues and waste, and transferred onto canvas. What emerges is a kind of toxic landscape painting. The landscape is not depicted but enters the work materially, through soil, dust, minerals, and residues of everyday life in the nitrate mines. The paintings become surfaces in which extraction, erosion, and abandonment accumulate — material archives of a transformed landscape.