One ounce of Specularite: The end

After 10 hours of grinding the specularite specimen from Londonderry Nova Scotia, here’s a photograph of what I’ve revealed: The bright, fiery red inside it.  This vermilion coloured pigment is so fine that when dry it will float away like smoke on the slightest movement of the air. The ritual around creating this colour went

One ounce of Specularite: The beginning

The questions around different forms of processing, those that reveal identity and those that change it, has been circling in my mind for the past month, so I’ve decided to work with a piece of specularite that I collected years ago in Londonderry, Nova Scotia.  To begin with, I carefully weighed 1 ounce of this

Nova Scotia: Finding Colour

While the gross work of pounding the pigment into colour was done, there still remained the work of finely grinding them. This work was done during a demonstration at the Homer Watson Gallery. When grinding with a glass muller, one can’t help but notice that some rocks grind up with ease, but others require a

Paint Brook, Nova Scotia

  Today, our search for pigment led us out to Paint Brook, in Elmsvale. The information we had raved about the quality of the gold ochre and burnt sienna pigments found at this source. After speaking with a local man (who told us to, “go fill your boots!”) we headed up the brook. The brook

Glencoe Pilgrimage

The man who we met on the trail laughed when we ask him where the mine was in Glencoe. “There has never been a mine here”, he stated. I didn’t notice the playful gleam in his eye and began to protest when he cut in with a laugh, “It was just a pit!” When I

West Gore Pilgrimage

We weren’t able to find out much about the old West Gore Mine, but the promise of a black Stibnite vein, “six feet wide” sounded promising when we headed out. Upon arriving it became obvious that the actual mining works were abandoned many, many years ago and there wasn’t a lot to see from that