Heritage Quay is the special collections, archives, and records management service at the University of Huddersfield. They specialise in education, British 20th/21st century music, sport, politics and activism, theatre and performance, and art and design.
The Heavy Water Collective visited Heritage Quay in April 2025, as part of their Cultures of Climate Residency with the University of Huddersfield.
The above slide is from the Gordon & Enid Minter Slides Archive, which comprises 100s of slides accompanied by various hand written lectures. This particular slide details a sandstone post situated at the side of Wakefield Road in the area of Flockton, West Yorkshire. In that post there is a deep groove, made by an 18th Century pulley system for hauling coal trucks back up the hill once they had sent their goods down to the canal at Horbury Bridge as part of an industrial tram system. Hollows, grooves, gaps, clefts, absences, marks, lancuna, tunnels, voids, depressions, cavities, excavations, pits. Everything I have engaged with in this archive relates to sculpture and form; from the carved hollows underground to the apparatus built above ground to assist in the extraction and distribution of coal deposits. Thus, the artwork developed in response deals with absence and presence / negative and positive, while considering what these shapes might come to represent in a world deeply impacted by these historic site-based activites.
The above image depicts a series of ‘boring frames’, apparatus used to support boring operations when searching for coal deposits (printed in A Practical Treatise on Coal Mining, by George G. André, F.G.S. (1876). Heritage Quays Archive, Ref: YOR/35). I like their structure as a frame positioned in and supporting a moment of anticipation; that first puncture of surface in order to determine what lies beneath. I created a similar frame in the studio that holds images of miners at work deep below ground — a premonition perhaps from those initial explorations of subterranean unknowns. The miners in the images, which are found postcards that I have adapted, are positioned as sculptors — as they chip away at the earth’s surface with a pick like an artisan with a chisel.
Surfacing
Wood, found postcards, jesmonite, coal dust, graphite
95 x 205 x 40 cm
2025
The Danger Is Coming, Venomous Saint #1 and #2, and The Danger Within Us are three artworks that draw on colonial agricultural reports and visual archives examining farming in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). Key sources include All About Grub (1881) by Robert Camperdown Haldane, a tract describing a beetle identified as an agricultural pest, and Matthew Holmes’ essay A Parochial Approach: Colonial Entomology on the Plantations of Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka. The works also incorporate imagery inspired by J.A. Brooks’ Nature and Plantation Life, a series of early twentieth-century glass plate negatives depicting mining, quarrying, farming, and warships in Ceylon and elsewhere. An additional reference is the eighteenth-century publication Natural History of Bees (1744), which documents the life cycles and diseases of these pollinating insects.
Palm trees recur throughout archival material related to Sri Lanka, functioning both as botanical subjects and as emblems of colonial agricultural ambition. The mass production of palm oil, introduced in Sri Lanka in the 1960s, led to widespread deforestation and a severe loss of biodiversity. Today, this highly lucrative crop is present in roughly half of all packaged products sold in our supermarkets.
Photo: Jules Lister
Palm trees, cast in bronze, appear in both The Danger Within Us and The Danger Is Coming. Here they function as a dual religious symbol, both sacred icon and obfuscation, the tree that hides the forest. Together, these elements ask what signs we choose to heed, and which warnings we overlook, when danger is already approaching.
The Danger Is Coming, Venomous Saint #1 and #2, and The Danger Within Us can be read as altarpieces. A speculative gesture that elevates bees and their internal anatomies into a new form of deity. Haya-Baviera has redrawn multiple historical renderings of bees’ anatomies. In The Danger Is Coming, these drawings are etched onto copper plates, referencing eighteenth-century photographic and printmaking techniques. In Venomous Saint #1 and #2, the images are screen printed onto copper plates. In The Danger Within Us, the bee takes the form of a larva, its gaping mouth and anthropomorphic back both alluring and ominous, an embodiment of impending threat.
In The Danger Is Coming, steel, copper, and bronze are used because their primary components, iron and copper, are foundational materials of the Industrial Revolution and feature prominently in the colonial archives informing the work. In Venomous Saint #1 and #2, copper is also employed for its golden, luminous quality, which strongly evokes religious iconography. In The Danger Within Us, the structure is made from waxed wood, its form alluding to industrial infrastructure, perhaps related to mining.
What Lies Beneath, an accompanying work, draws on J.A. Brooks’ glass plate negatives depicting open mines and, incidentally, the surrounding vegetation. The piece engages with history while also invoking deep time through forms that resemble geological strata. It recalls an ancient relief sculpture that might be found at the entrance to a temple. The forms evoke a sense of otherness, as if they are remnants emerging from the ground beneath our feet. Conjuring multiple temporalities, the work provokes layered reflections on the earth, flora, and symbolic systems of signs. It exists as an incomplete puzzle, a fractured frieze with missing elements, a modular structure that suggests an ever-changing landscape and matter unfolding across temporal thresholds.
Taken together, this body of work reflects on landscapes shaped by extraction, cultivation, and control. Sites where colonial ambition and industrial progress have produced long-lasting ecological harm. Through bees, palm trees, and geological forms, the works speak to the erosion of biodiversity and the fragility of interconnected systems pushed to collapse. By framing these elements as altarpieces and devotional objects, the series attempts to imagine an alternative belief system, one that re-centres non-human life, attends to warning signs, and resists the logics of exploitation. In doing so, the works ask whether new forms of reverence and responsibility might offer a way to prevent further ecological devastation, before the danger becomes irreversible.
Photo: Jules Lister
Photo: Jules Lister
Photo: Jules Lister
