Her­itage Quay is the spe­cial col­lec­tions, archives, and records man­age­ment ser­vice at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hud­der­s­field. They spe­cialise in edu­ca­tion, British 20^th/​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 18^th 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 the chip away at the earth­’s sur­face like a sculp­tor with a chisel.