Coal mining is not one of the first things you would think of when it comes to Ireland but in the town of Castlecomer they discovered a very small seam under some shale and for nearly 300 years this became the bedrock on which the town grew. (Yes, pun intended).
This finished in 1969 and now all that remains is a small heritage center to tell the tale.
Niall Magee and myself were invited by a gallery owner from Dublin to go down and produce some sculptures as part of an art exhibition he was putting on in the center. The art was pretty much covered but what he wanted us to do was create some pieces which would be a bit more public friendly and attract them to the 'real art'. We didn't mind making something just for show as we really didn't have any clue of what to make, not being very familiar with the area. He said a miner and some kind of Dinosaur would go down a treat, so problem solved and we could just carve away while leaving our artist caps at the door.
A miner discovery
I worked on the Miner and without thinking too deeply about it just went ahead and made your common or garden Miner.
The sand we found in this area was amazing, one of the best I have ever had the pleasure to work with. It turned out that the owner of the heritage center also owned a quarry and knew exactly what we were looking for. Earl was his name and a true gentleman unlike the gallery owner that had asked us to do the job but that's a story for another time.
During our time there he told us all the history of the area but unfortunately it came too late for we were well underway with our sculptures.
The seam of coal in the area was only 1 meter thick and the miners dug it all manually while crawling on their hands and knees in between the other layers of rock. My miner, standing tall was not a great depiction of the brave men of Castlecomer. Even though I was happy with how he turned out I felt a bit bad that I hadn't done my research first and glorified these guys a bit more. From what I heard it was very tough, dangerous work.
In the rocky surround of the miner I carved a few different fossils. It turns out that they had found some very interesting ones while they were digging for coal. Of course I had to make an ammonite or two.
Welcome to Jurassic Park
A big T-Rex fossil kind of thing was on the other side. Of course these were nothing like what was found in the mines. They had actually found several different species of amphibians and Thomas Henery Huxley or 'Darwins Bulldog' as his friends called him came to examine and document them himself. It was actually a pretty cool discovery.
Of course yet again our sculptures were not exactly the most true to life as they could or should have been.
Niall's dinosaur, even though quite nice looked even more out of place than my lumber jack come miner. But Earl was happy and so were the visitors and at the end of the day that is all that really matters.
My work brings me to many different places and means I have to come up with many different ideas for sculptures that are both physically possible in sand and also visually interesting. I can't be an expert in everything, especially when it comes to all the myriad of themes I have to create for.
Having finished our work we set off for other projects and the gallery owner was so happy he asked us to come back later in the year to make another one. Watch out for that post.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
Super Sized Nativity - sand sculpture
Ship Experiment - ice sculpture
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - ice sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
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