Ochre
12 items
Artist | Onya McCausland, Turning Landscape. Paint made from mine water ochre. The research was developed by Onya McCausland and is now run as a collective community project CIC. ‘This research programme has involved intensive engagement with places where mining and quarrying is still shaping the landscapes to observe and document evolving knowledge of particular sites, their geology, the mineralogical peculiarities and the effect mineral extraction has on the contemporary landscape. Each ochre forming in each landscape is geologically distinct and can be seen as an index of a place - formed from the specific environmental, ecologic, geographic idiosyncrasies of that place only.’ - ++[https://turninglandscape.com/](https://turninglandscape.com/)++
Rio Tinto river | Europe's largest open-cast mining area (mined for copper, tin, silver extracted from oxidised sulphides, mined in Tartessian times, heavily by the Romans, and still to this day) is upstream. According to NASA the Stained River "flows through an area unusually rich with sulfide ore deposits, which formed hundreds of millions of years ago when volcanoes were active in the area. When the metals in these buried deposits are exposed to water and oxygen, they produce acidic runoff that flows into streams and rivers. While the acid has made the Rio Tinto inhospitable to most types of life, it has made it more hospitable to sulfide-consuming bacteria and other extremophiles that amplify the acidification process. These organisms give the river its red hue by producing ferric iron, a rust-colored substance"
Vivianite forming in clays and silts in Bavaria, from Dill & Techmer (2009). The Pigment Timeline Project, Ruth Siddall, UCL
Entrance to the Lascaux cave in 1940. On 2nd February 2020, Simon Coencas, the last of the four discoverers of the Lascaux cave, passed away. He was 13 when he discovered the caves. Picutred, from left to right: Léon Laval (schoolteacher), Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal (two of the four teenagers who discovered the Lascaux cave), Abbot Henri Breuil (prehistorian who authenticated the discovery).
Steel, which I think of as suffocated ochre, is the key of the modern industrial-techno-global world, including colonial culture’s ability to expand, control, imprison and dominate—railroads, nails, chains, engines, drill bits, sewing needles, compasses, the backbone of civilization’s material, etc. Industrial steel gave us an ability to change a relatively stable climate era into an unstable mass crisis and extinction in just a few hundred years.
— Heidi Gustafson On Preserving Hundreds of Humanity’s Oldest Art Materials, Colossal
Vivianite is a most curious one belonging to the group of magnetic pigments… It often goes by the name of Blue Ochre and, yes, it is an Earth pigment but not an ochre. It’s an aqueous iron phosphate that looks like almost transparent glass and only takes on its blue-gray color when ground. In paint it interestingly shifts from grey to blue to green. In 1979, the nearly complete mummy of a bison covered with a blue chalky substance was found in Alaska. That mineral coating of white vivianite was produced when phosphorus from the animal tissue reacted with iron in the soil. When the vivianite was exposed to air, it turned to a brilliant blue, earning the bison the nickname Blue Babe.
— Appendix I. 88 Pigments in chronological order, In Bed With Monalisa
Earthy vivianite deposits are found in peat bogs where iron-rich waters can react with phosphate in the organic matter to form the mineral. This seems the most likely source of the pigment used by Cuyp, since not only was peat abundant in the Netherlands but there was an active peat industry around Dordrecht as well as elsewhere in the Netherlands
— National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 2009. Albert Cuyp’s 'The Large Dort': Colour Change and Conservation. Marika Spring and Larry Keith
