Mining Graphite

From 'Gangue Minerals and Pigment Earths' by Michael Shaw

Graphite is an allotrope of carbon, a black semi metal also known as plumbago or black-lead. The mineral was known of by the monks of Furness Abbey who are reported to have used it to mark their sheep (Lax & Maxwell 1998) and to rule guide lines in documents[4]. By the late 16th century it was certainly in use as a drawing material and probably for rust proofing iron (grate polish etc) (Camden 1610). The mine passed through many hands including in the early 17th century the Hechsetter brothers, as a private venture rather than as part of their Mines Royal activity. The most significant uses during the 18th century were for moulds for cannon balls and other iron munitions, crucibles and lubrication for ship’s rigging. These uses gave the material immense value, £3,500 a ton being noted c.1800 [4]. The material led to the development of the Keswick pencil industry in the late 18th century with locally mined graphite being used for the best quality pencils until stocks were exhausted before the First World war, mining having ceased c.1891. Graphite occurs as pipes, lumps, nodules, sops or bellies up to 1m by 3m, often following quartz strings.

         [4] http://www.conistonlocal.co.uk/striking-black-gold-in-the-lakeland-fell-tops-1.692082?referrerPath=home

Seathwaite graphite was 98 per cent pure carbon and had a melting point of 3,927C. This made it wonderful for blacking fire grates but even better for greasing the blocks and pulleys on Royal Navy ships and for making rifles and canons fire faster and more accurately.

So important was this national resource that an Act of Parliament was introduced in 1752 to prevent the stealing of graphite. Among the punishments was transportation.

By 1800 graphite was worth £3,500 a ton and a time when lead was worth just £15 a ton and the average miner was earning a £1 a week.

Armed guards patrolled the mine site and miners were searched at the end of work to try and prevent pilfering – with limited success.

The pieces missed by the guards were sold at local pubs and possibly gave rise to the expression black market and to a wad of money.

Paper and Light

Almost everything now is drawn on translucent paper. The heavier and more transparent the paper, the better. It's a fragile surface, hates liquid, is unforgiving of creases or dents, but equally will take endless erasure and a very thick build-up of graphite. But that isn't the most important thing about it. It's about what's left free and empty and open.

In effect, I want the paper not to be a consideration, not to have tooth, or colour or presence, and transparent or translucent slick paper provides that 'thought-free' quality as well as giving a liquid, opalescent luminescence to the finished drawing, hovering behind the element doing all the work, the graphite.

"Milton", SWOON, 2009
Linoleum cut, on tracing paper on found door, hand-colored, signed, 221 x 93 cm
Exhibition: "SQUINCHES AND PENDENTIVES" 

I can't find any working artists using this paper for drawing as a finished piece. Plenty use it to make paper sculptures. A few use it for collage or assemblages, and it's cropping up in contemporary darkroom photography, but not simple drawing.

Updated...
So a few hours later the postman delivers my first tin of the Derwent XL graphite blocks whose novelty appealed and whose reality is simply, as my friend in the North would say, 'lush'. And on the tin is a graphite drawing by Ian Hodgson, a new name to me.

And I think, looking at this, here's someone who has really mastered graphite as a medium, in and of itself, soft and hard, shiny and dark, luminous and shaded. And that fingerprint? Apart from any other meaning, it's a frank statement of the hand-madeness of a drawing, the physical work that goes into real drawing like this, no short cuts, no technology. And his artist's statement contains a paragraph which is genuinely interesting:

 The drawing techniques that I use expose other, seemingly invisible layers, and here the drawing process acts as a metaphor for the physical and psychological experience of my journey, as fragments of what went before are revealed on the paper.

Translucent paper tends to leave behind the traces of what was there, even with erasure, since the drawing always has two sides. And the 'wrong' side can tell a more 'authentic' story about how the drawing came to be, through mistakes, changes and adjustments.

What monsters may come?

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Teaching Hamlet used to make me tired and bored. No effort seemed enough to prevent it becoming a seminar-by-numbers, about angst and revenge, procrastination and action, melancholia and sanguine heroism, fighting the tendency of teenagers to over-identify with Hamlet, his unloving mother and his unpleasant stepfather. It seemed a play of callowness, of tedious self-absorption, until Fortinbras arrives, deus ex machina, to tidy all that muddy psychodrama away with civic order.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is a story that could just have easily been told by Kafka, of the individual cut adrift, by virtue of education, geography, institutional drift and arbitrary power, left to stumble their way through half-lit corridors and shadowy motivations cloaked in obfuscating legalistic verbiage, unable to recognise landmarks, signs, the orientation of what once seemed transparent and right side up. Hamlet is Gregor Samsa or Josef K, cockroach or man on trial, awakening to a strangely changed reality. He sees differently. And is seen differently. That's all it takes to end up being killed by the regime.

Dwelling on the understanding of this process, that is what conjures up the monsters. 'Monster' is the name the regime gives to those who see differently. 'Monster' is a name for the nightmares that come when the regime turns its eye on you and finds you monstrous.

Horace's Eye

What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds that what is presented to the trustworthy eye.
                                                                         Horace

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part Three

If I have long been accustomed to having a very good visual memory, I now seem to have a far more acute case of synesthesia.

Pain is coloured. The constant companion ache comes in shades of violet, turning more greenish as the ache grows deeper and wider. The variable pain which is dazing and mutable comes in shades of orange, from a peach blush to a harsh neon, almost (confusingly) blinding. Shades of graphite grey are a sanctuary from riotous colourful pain, perhaps.

But, more importantly, the act of drawing something conjures its presence, be it fur or feathers, dry cracked paint, bark, thorns or hair on skin. The better the drawing the more acutely I can feel it under my finger tips. Tis a curious sensation, with seeing and feeling merging to become the self-same thing. This is new. Where before there was a huge gap between the looking and the act of the drawing that needed to be bridged, all calculated, grafted for, now touch, sight and motion are melded when a drawing is going well. But it only works with pencils. A seamless extension of the hand, no need to worry about replacing caps or some such thing. The immediacy of application, the lack of hesitancy, the reassurance of erasability, all contribute to a Thing which springs from a place where feeling and seeing become indistinguishable from one another.

Maybe it's some compensatory equivalent to going blind and having better hearing, that the correlation of being forced to be so aware of the body (hell, some days now I can feel each individual vertebra) is a heightened ability to feel other things in curious ways.

Dictum

Life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance.
                                                               Gauguin

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part Two

I thought I was attuned to the experience of being 'outside' of the inside, the working class oik at grammar school and university, bridging two worlds which did not understand each other; driven out of all the normal tropes of childhood by years of experiences of dark and depraved violence, knowing far too much about all the wrong things, acquiring a skill set no one should ever need; unapologetically a psychiatric patient, declining to hide behind the taboo.

And now I find I am being mocked in the street or on the bus by strangers, because my walking is so laboured, or glared at as if drunk or talked to as if retarded. And I'm slowly coming to realise this is a new outsider identity I've had forced on me - disabled.

I can be so slow about these things. I shouldn't be surprised. I've enough disabled friends through the years to know the reality, that people do stare, are rude, are discomforted by someone different or odd
looking and turn offensive from fear or anger. But all of a sudden it's me, quite proud of myself for having walked to the supermarket, who realises that there are a loving couple in their early 20s pointing and sniggering, while they mimic, sat down, my lurching shoulder movements. I stared back, she reddened and mumbled to him, they both looked away.

I've lost count of the number of times that shop assistants have waited for me to reach out for my change (or not waited and dropped it) while I try to say 'My arms don't go that far any more', and some will look at me like I'm being lazy or superior or maybe even racist, and then I'm leaving the shop humiliated, so useless I can't even collect my change without making a fuss. There's no dignity to this outsidership, no high ground of history to stand on, no narrative sense to transform it into resistance against lies and myths and ideology. I'm dragging around a hurting, broken carcass and the world wants an apology.

I am stuck with this reality defining the form of the art I can make, along with a host of other mundane stuff. I do not want it to define anything else about it. But that may be wishing thinking.

Ugh, self-pity is an ugly and worthless emotion.

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part One

This is the art of making the best of it.

The gap between what I would be doing if I were healthy and what I am doing is getting wider all the time. Accommodating the limitations imposed on me by my own corporeal existence means an endless series of compromises, negotiations and parallel solutions to make an equivalent of what I want to do.

I can't manipulate large pieces of paper at all so I have to work small. When your arms actually don't stretch wide enough to handle A3, the scale of the world shrinks.

Pain and weakness mean I can't apply sufficient pressure to the tools to make the etchings I would settle for making, let alone the woodcuts I long to make.

Myoclonic jerks mean I can't safely handle anything sharp or pointed, and anything involving wet media is asking for trouble.

One could, from a glass-half-full perspective, label it as necessity being the mother of invention. All last summer, immobilised and coming apart at the seams with pain, while waiting helplessly for Bill to complete his terrible passage to death, I drew. Every day, all day, with the 'humble' graphite pencil, between doses of dihdyrocodeine, I drew hundreds of things, without thinking, or judging or planning, stumbling or occasionally crawling between bed and desk in a drug and pain daze. I wasn't trying to do anything, learn anything, achieve anything, other than find something I could do which helped. And it did: when nothing else was making any sense, the drawing did. But I think I must have learnt stuff by default, by sheer quantity of doing.

It was the only source of sensory pleasure in my life for those months, holding a pencil, putting graphite on the paper. When every other thing about being a body was hard or disgusting or problematic, the physical act of drawing brought me joy. I had never been fond of the shinyness of graphite, still aren't to be honest, but there was something so seductive about the slickness of pencil on translucent paper (when the rest of me creaked and squealed and growled), combined with the ability to create areas of infinite faintness or a thick mat of graphite, which made the act of drawing and the drawings themselves into an arena of controlled manipulation and invention. I could make a world of my own with a pencil over which I could gain mastery, a curious combination of conquest and liberation.

Holding the pencil became a non-obvious act, since its position in the hand became important in making it do certain things. And short pencils became precious because they were useful in ways long pencils couldn't be.

I learnt about different ways of sharpening pencils - cone points and bullet points. Online shopping brought me different kinds of graphite tool, brands of pencil, graphite sticks and blocks and powder, since I was going through about a dozen pencils a week with ease. I never got picky or snobby about brands or series but discovered the strengths and weaknesses of each, how oily or crumbly they were, how well they adhered to slick paper, how variable the xB designations seemed to be.

But. With all that said, there persists that gap between ambition and actuality. Wishing won't change it. Nor will trying to override it. (I've tried both.) There sits in my head a sense of my self and my drawings not as artist and art but as a child playing with pencils. Yeah, yeah, I hear the objections, but sitting with a pencil in my fist drawing the things in my head makes my feel like a kid. And it's hard to view the products of the act as 'art'. I want them to be, I really do. I want to get better, to understand the medium I've got 'stuck with' and deploy it to its full extent. But ultimately I'm still the kid with the box of pencils and the drawings of her dreams.