Onya McCausland 'Landscapes' - Online Exhibition Catalogue

L A N D S C A P E S
A N D S C
A P E S

ONYA MCCAUSLAND
MCCAUSLAND

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LANDSCAPES
(From Coal Mine Waste to Landscape Painting)
These landscapes / paintings are made using
ochre or iron oxide pigments that form as waste
during the treatment of mine water in coal mining
regions across the UK. Their names: Cuthill in West
Lothian, Scotland; Deerplay Hill in Bacup, Lancashire;
Saltburn in East Yorkshire and Tan-y-Garn in South
Wales,, acknowledge the origins and complexities
of the ochres’ formation, and link the great coal
mining regions of the UK’s industrial past with the
formation of contemporary colour. The individual
colours of the landscapes are determined by the
unique conditions of their geological context by
responding and behaving in different ways to
processes in the studio. Each material dictates its
own idiosyncratic form of representation - individual
paintings recall their landscape origins, embodying a
memory of place. Individual works involve, evolve
and invoke the physicality of material process more
explicitly. The personality of the material is revealed
through its formation: these paintings follow the
materials’ urge, its sensuality, implicating natural
forces of fluidity, skin, surface and viscera.
The landscape sites and paintings are not only about
the discovery and utility of a new colour material, the
paintings here also deal with different formal concerns
around ways of seeing within the concept /“confines”
of landscape painting; they propose alternative ways of
perceiving and conceiving landscape and its uses, by
voicing the materiality of place in ways that overlap, or
conflate geological and human time frames.Traditional
devises, or ‘tropes’ of landscape painting are exploited,
pointing to and describing surface and depth. These
perspectival orientations and formal organisations of
surface historically have been used as a means of
placing/displacing, separaing/folding, of suggesting
proximity and distance.
The space and spacial relationships in particular works
define and undermine stable placement or positioning
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of where we are. Some works like Deerplay Hill,
describe the surface as a topography - from the Greek
topographia, from topos ‘place’ and graphia; to write.
A landscape, of moorland, mountain and bog, seen and
experienced from the ground (both the “ground” of the
painting and the earth) is also one seen close up. The
surface of a painting is not only optical but tactile,
sensual, physical, animal like, material.
The physicality of the paintings run parallel and equal
to their opticality. The depth, opacity, transparency of
individual colours are reflected in the landscapes they
belong to : Saltburn ochre is derived from mines in
the North East coast just south of Middlesborough
where the sharp bright light, refracted off the
North sea has a flattening effect on the surrounding
landscape. The Deep mines, run under the sea creating an
oppositional pull between surface and depth, cerebral
and psyche, light ness and dark. This is accentuated by the
methods of seeing the sites from Google earth and as the
paintings are inextricably linked to the mine water
treatment sites where the colours are forming - the sites
(photographed from Google Earth) are also conceived of
as landscape paintings.
Cuthill works concern themselves also with the
process of material formations with the hand/ without
the hand - material as it forms in the landscape and in the
studio : matter subjected to the action of its own
physical properties where the optical develops with the
material in the making - material follows physical laws -
gravity, motion, viscosity, pressure and temperature - the
same physical laws that cause sand dunes, land slides,
sediments and mountains to form. The colour Tan-y-Garn
is heavy and blood-like - haema or haima, as in haematite,
which means blood, as if it comes from an ancient place
resonant with the human body, fluidly, water flow,
viscosity and sensuality“ the mud, the blood and the
beer” echoing the landscape. There is resemblance - in
the medieval sense that like things are reflected in
each other.
These paintings here are just a stage in processes
of material transformation or a meeting point of
converging processes - from mine water minerals
oxidising and participating in the formation of landscape,
to becoming ochre and in turn to becoming landscapes
hanging on the walls of the gallery: They can be seen as
a redefinition of sorts of landscape painting... exploring
an examination of materials from different perspectives,
view points and across various scales.
The material is a starting point for the paintings, the
paintings a temporary representational interpretation
culminating in the synthesis of geological formation
and human intervention. The works - the paintings and
the sites - can be seen as a performance of change
where the connections between physical processes and
human actions cannot be separated. These landscapes
made from this distinct material are part of the lineage
of human activities and cultural practices that stretch
back to the beginning of human history. Cave painting,
ancient burials, mining, waste and landscape painting. And
colour, the process of making ochre that the mine water
treatment sites perform is historically unique, and
the material that the sites harnesses is an important
cultural signifier.
Each landscape site produces a different coloured ochre
that is mineralogically unique to that place, to that mine,
to that geography: the colour and the painting converge,
they signify and embody Place - identity, belonging,
history, community, the economy and the contemporary
economics of waste.
Onya McCausland, 2018
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VISIONS OF EXCESS
Type the coordinates 54°34 07.37 N 0°57 42.87 into
google earth and you will dive down into a pool of red:
‘Saltburn Mine Water Treatment scheme’. I say dive into,
however this virtual free fall halts just before you reach
ground level; a jittering curser hovering directly above.
From this aerial perspective the landscape is levelled
out. Conventional sight lines are rearranged, with the
horizons lumps airbrushed and flattened. Saltburn’s Mine
Water Treatment pools lose their rippling variation and
the distinct areas of colour are isolated, as if neatly fitting
into a hardware store wall paint colour chart. A hardware
aesthetic created by a piece of computer software. It is as
Italo Calvino said; ‘software cannot exercise its powers of
lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is
the software that gives the orders […] The iron machines
still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits’.
These google map screenshots expose their digital
creator; the treatment sites in their rigid geometry
have the inhuman appearance of computer integrated
circuit chips.
Perhaps the treatment site itself is still something
of Calvino’s ‘iron machine’, obeying the demands of
almost weightless particles (a mineralisation process
unlocks pyrite which is then oxidised into the insoluble
ferric form and precipitates particles of ochre
pigment). This dynamic eco system is not evident from
the static monochrome found on google earth. Whilst the
dizzying descent into coordinates gives the impression
of rattling through the macro to access the micro it is
ultimately disappointing. We remain so far away,
suspended in this unnatural aerial vacuum there are no
faithful timekeepers; not the drum beat in my chest,
nor the lilt and sway of breath, no august chorus
of insect chatter clicking in the clammy night. These
natural rhythms are autotuned to obey the same
frequency, so we access digitals images without presence.
We see monochromes without organs.
The map is not the territory, nor is it a simple ‘birds eye
view’. With new features like ‘angled’ and ‘street’ views
multiple perspectives are amalgamated to produce a
multifocal image. Where are we experiencing this from?
Where is our place in this landscape? The nature of our
human experience is our inability to master all fields
of vision. Phenomenology, the study of consciousness
experienced from the first-person point of view,
understands totalising accounts to be impossible. Our
perception is constrained by what is in front or behind,
above or below, only rectified by physically changing
position. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that ‘experience
is [...] lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not
the spectator, I am involved’.
McCausland does not halt at surface, rather she plunges
into the depths of terrain entering into a dialogue with
that which the earth provides.
The titles of her works reflect this engagement that
occurs both above and beneath ground. ‘Cuthill’
references the depth of the mine, using the
vertical reference system: Ordinance Datum Newlyn -
which establishes a reliable bench mark measurement
system underground whilst The Google Earth images by
contrast are titled according to the distance from above
the ground. Passing through the earth’s membrane she
facilitates an interplay between above and beneath,
light and shade. Not only does McCausland’s practice
re-orientate the physical axis of our engagement with
landscape. She scrutinises our conceptual axis with
regard to how we approach and understand ‘waste’.
McCausland’s colour is the waste product of a
decanting process. ‘Waste’ is often considered
contaminated or hybridised and, if no adequate
nutrient retrieval systems exist, then its use value is
voided. In 2014, between 4 and 5 thousand tons of
ochre were being sent to landfill every year because an
economically viable use could not be found and
landfill was the cheapest option. By reusing this
otherwise redundant material in her work McCausland
has demonstrated the uniqueness and cultural value of
these colours and their landscape contexts. Her practice
re-energises the discarded matter bestowing it with new
life-force as artists’ pigment. There is no useless matter. if
something seems useless, we should not discard the thing
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itself but reassess the frame in which we have trapped it.
These muddy pools are rather fonts abundant with blood
red pigment.
McCausland’s recognition of the potential of the
overlooked is embodied by Baudelaire’s rag picker who
‘in the muddy maze of some old neighbourhood, Often,
where the street lamp gleams like blood’ catalogues and
collates the annals of intemperance. In this figure the
locating and repurposing of foraged scraps becomes
an extended metaphor for the poetic method. Both
ragman and poet are concerned with the disregarded
and refused. The ragman found an accomplice in the
Avant Garde artist of the 20th century. From Dada
Collages to Rauschenberg’s accumulation, artists used the
flatbed picture plane as an adhesive surface upon which
all manner of residue could gather. The act of retrieval
and assemblage, rather than composition of painting
proper, results in an openness, a negation of ego in favour
of object agency. These practices did not turn their back
on the world but were occupied by it. When Picasso
made his collages, he said he wanted the real offal of
human life, the dirty, poor and despised. These moves
motivated by the desire to muddy the sheen of the
commodity and circumvent the economy of the art
market reached parodic status when Piero Manzoni
canned his own shit and sold on par with the value
of gold. This act epitomises Freud’s belief that
artworks always have an overdetermined relationship to
faeces. But so do all systems, be them bodily, aesthetic,
economic. Everything participates in the impulsive and
uncontrollable drives of ingestion and excretion. I note
we began this essay soaring above, trapped in a slick
sealed computer programme, we have now plunged into
the base, where all is soiled and pigment is belched out
of the belly of the earth.
McCausland’s recognition of the interrelation between
waste matter and art matter follows in the footsteps
of Baudelaire’s’ ragman and Manzoni’s Freudian jester
persona. But it also follows the economic theories of
Bataille for whom the output of one system served as
input for another system. Whilst the treatment sites
attempt to control and contain the ‘waste’ material,
its life does not end there. it is as Bataille said; ‘rather
than the excretion of the foreign body removing the
foreign body it actually liberates it, and liberates it to a
heterogeneity that is out of control’. Sensitivity to
matter’s vibrant potential facilitates transference from
one perspective to another. The waste is energised
as the fuel for a business endeavour; as commercially
available pigment. The landscape is ecologically and
economically fertile; producing ochre, generating an
income for the local econmy and creating high-quality
pigment for artists. Nietzsche commented; ‘the world
exists - it is not something that becomes, not something
that passes away, or rather, it becomes, it passes away,
but it has never begun to become and never ceases from
passing away – it maintains itself in both – it lives on itself;
its excrements are its food’.
The artists’ picture plane is emblematic of the porosity
between ingestion and excretion. When applying the
pigment McCausland notes how when the second wet c
oat met with the first dry coat it was immediately sucked
into the dry ochre, like parched soil that gulps down fresh
water. Colour consumes colour, allowing it to become
healthy and ‘full bodied’ in tone. Colour also absorbs
light and alters accordingly; expanding and contracting its
mass, weight and volume.
Each pigment has distinct behavioural properties just
as each mine site has its own method of water
treatment, its own lexicon, creating an entirely unique
ochre pigment. ‘Tan-y-garn’ site uses limestone and
mushroom compost to reduce the acidity of the water
and make a full bodied reddish brown. At ‘Saltburn’,
the water from an iron stone mine becomes a light
yellow ochre. Even within one pigment there are multiple
potentialities, it can be a milky tangerine when raw and a
dense syrupy russet when cooked. The capacity to receive
and repel colour and light alters depending on whether the
pigment is wet or dry, raw or cooked. Onya has titled some
works with reference to the cooking process; ‘Iron oxide
pigment from Cuthill Mine Water Treatment Scheme
(2016) burnt at 600° mixed in oil on gessoed canvas’.
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This is a quantitative title that entails qualitative
engagements with surface and ground.
The passage from raw to cooked is found in most mythic
narratives and is commonly emblematic of the passage
from death to life. At the Palaeolithic Terra Amata
site in Nice, archaeologists retrieved 75 ochre pieces /
ranging in shades from yellow to red and red-brown,
with many intermediate and irregular ones attributable
to different thermal influences. It is understood that the
transformation of yellow stone into red was interpreted
by the Early Acheulian hunter-gatherers as a magic, life
affirming process. Through the addition of heat a sickly
yellow stone could be revived and made bulbous with
red blood. Ochre is used in the mortuary rituals of
many Mousterian sites, Palaeo-Indians and Late Archaic
populations in North America where red pigment would
be smothered on the flesh of the dead or placed in bowls
beside the body. These practices recall the Maori legend
of a woman who, in the nether world, came upon a bowl
of ochre, she ingested the colour and was returned to
life. These burial practices coat the skin with pigment
enabling the pores to ‘ingest’ the substance with hope
that the body is sustained beyond the grave. McCausland
feeds surfaces with ochre, and as the canvas consumes
the colour it gains more agency. This is nowhere more
apparent than in ‘Cuthill watercolour (drop)’.
Experimenting with how the pigment responds to
contact with different surfaces McCausland placed paper
in a horizontal water tank and poured the pigment on
top. Left overnight in the dark, the ochre blindly feels its
way toward the bottom of the container and joins with
the paper. Interestingly its fall forms softly curving hills of
dusty red; recalling the shape of the land from which it
was born (we are forever on our way home)
The ochre forms on paper also recall the derelict heaps
of red shale known as John Latham’s ‘bings’. In 1975,
the Scottish Development agency contacted artist John
Latham for an urban renewal project. Concerned that
these heaps of burnt and oxidised oil shale constituted an
‘eyesore’ in the landscape what was really required was a
new outlook. Let us recall; If something seems useless we
should not discard the thing itself but reassess the frame
in which we have trapped it. Latham re-conceptualised
the mounds of waste as ‘process sculptures’. They were
named as landmarks and with that given a new identity
and impetus. In Room 2, McCausland provides a map
that shows the seams of coal mines, and four shards of
shale from one of Latham’s bings, weigh down the map’s
four corners.
Following Latham’s approach, McCausland is
campaigning for the mine water treatment sites
themselves be renamed as monuments. This move to
name the sites does not untether the perspective I
have been weaving (for this perspective is something
of an ever cycling mobeius loop). I have so far stressed
how McCausland relinquishes the role of artist as
someone who controls and contains colour to adopt
the role of gleaner who liberates the voice of the
discarded. Consequently, the idea ‘trademarking’ may
seem the antithesis of a sensitive approach. Sticking
words to things always entails some form of capture. but
McCausland’s naming follows the sympathetic leanings of
Walt Whitman who was so attuned to the murmurings
of matter that his poetry is a seismograph of its song. His
elemental words, as he defined them, do not overwrite
but ‘accord’ with the earth, and ‘are in the air, they are
in you’. Pregnant with multiple temporalities, words are
not static in definition and fixed to the page but are
‘lispings of the future’. Again returning to the notion
of the passage from raw to cooked, Whitman’s song of
the rolling earth proclaims ‘amelioration is the blood
that runs through the body of the universe’. As in Early
Acheulian ritual where burnt ochre was saturated with
this vital red life force, Whitman’s poetic form warms
words until they throb with energy. Words, like the
earth, possess something underneath, that something is
meaning and that something is colour. McCausland
taps into Whitman’s seismograph. Rather than
hybridising and contaminating the colour with metaphor
she amplifies what has been silenced. Naming the colour
as it obdurately exists in its environment. Mary Douglas
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wrote how dirt is not dangerous so long as it without a
name. In naming the pigment after the site McCausland
unleashes its vibrant agency. Much like the methods of
Manzoni, Picasso and Rauschenberg; the refuse is realised.
Through the act of naming, landscape is socially and
historically experienced; it becomes a collective event.
The experience of viewing these works within the
gallery setting is also a collective event where we are in
dialogue with space, colour, time, light, one another, etc.
The structure of the architecture entails each gallery
space be stacked vertically, creating a kind of geological
strata in which the works, like worms, can create their
own environment. The viewer journeys through lightness
and darkness, penetrating each zone and consequently
becoming aware of a distinct materiality of the space.
Whilst each room draws attention to a different Mine
Water Treatment scheme and thus a different pigment,
there is a binding relationship between them. The layout
of the exhibition behaves much like the systems I have
outlined. McCausland’s project recognises that nothing
can be understood in isolation; waste is in a dialectical
relationship with wealth, just as there is porosity between
raw and cooked. Rather than a hierarchical linear
narrative, everything participates in a cyclical system.
It makes sense then that none of McCausland’s work
exists as a singularity but is extended and environmental,
operating in part to whole relations. One plane is but the
crop of a harvest of pigment. A horizon line is but a bend in a
vertical. A straight line the fragment of a curve. Upon
viewing, we too must be the ragman, the archaeologist,
gleaning and excavating the matter before us to piece
together a whole of ecological influx and efflux.
Standing before McCausland’s works, time is not a
container but a component, where all is in process, all is
in song. Walt Whitman extolled ‘the masters know the
earth’s words and use them more than audible words’.
McCausland is exploring the earth’s vocabulary.
Isabelle Bucklow, 2018

DEERPLAY HILL
Deerplay Hill, Bacup, Lancashire
The Mine Water Treatment Site at Deerplay Hill sits high up on Todmorden Moor - the source of the river Calder in
the Lancashire Pennines - overlooking the wind farms that have sprung up in recent years. The landscape is formed
of shale, mudstone, sandstones and gritstones, the ground is a thick layer of hill peat covered in scrub grasses and
heather. The peat minerals in the ground influence the colour leaching from the old mines which appears dark
brownish orange in the landscape. When the ochre has been dried and ground and painted in a transparent medium
like watercolour it reveals a wider register of colour from dark charred brown with a tinge of purple, through to a
golden-orange undertone.
The relatively small scale of the mine workings in this region, which mainly closed around the 1960’s, are a
reflection of the geological fracturing of the coal fields caused by fault lines cutting up and displacing the coal field.
Saltburn Site 54°34 07.37 N 0°57 42.87 W: 1130m Mine Water Treatment Scheme
GPS photograph, Somerset archival paper, wood plinth
dimensions TBC
edition of 5

Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
150 x 180 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
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Deerplay Hill
Deerplay ochre in oil on canvas
150 x 180 cm
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Deerplay Hill Wall Painting
Deerplay ochre emulsion on wall
dimensions variable
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CUTHILL
Cuthill, West Lothian, Scotland
The Mine Water Treatment Scheme built in 2003 sits beside the river Almond near Addiewell village
in West Lothian, Scotland. The coal mines were worked here until the early 1960’s. The coal provided
fuel for the giant furnaces used for extracting oil from shale in Scotlands first oil industry. Cuthill Mine
Water Treatment Scheme is a few fields away from one of the slag heaps or ‘bings’ that mark the landscape
of West Lothian; Five Sisters Bing was designated an artwork by John Latham in 1976, and has
since become an internationally recognised monument. The scheme at Cuthill performs the function of
cleaning the polluting mine water that inadvertently produces many tones of waste ochre every year.
Burning ochre at around 600 degrees will cause it to dehydrate, turning the yellow ochre material red. The ochre
from Cuthill is distinguished by the subtle pinkish tone it creates when burnt, a colour that resembles the burnt
fragments of waste shale that form the structures of the ‘bings’.
Cuthill Mine No.24 Abandonment Plan
cat no. S411 with oil shale rocks
dimensions TBC

Cuthill Red / -1325 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
iron oxide pigment from Cuthill Mine Water Treatment Scheme burnt at 600° in oil on gessoed canvas
50 x 50 cm
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Cuthill Red / -1325 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
iron oxide pigment from Cuthill Mine Water Treatment Scheme burnt at 600° in oil on gessoed canvas
100 x 100 cm
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Cuthill Red / -1325 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
iron oxide pigment from Cuthill Mine Water Treatment Scheme burnt at 600° in oil on gessoed canvas
100 x 100 cm
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Cuthill Raw (River)
ochre pigment and watercolour medium on paper
56 x 76 cm
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Cuthill Raw (Sag)
ochre pigment and watercolour medium on paper
56 x 76 cm
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Cuthill Raw
ochre pigment and watercolour medium on paper
56 x 76 cm
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Cuthill Raw (Drop)
ochre pigment and watercolour medium on paper
56 x 76 cm
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SALTBURN
Saltburn, Cleveland
South of Middlesborough on the north east coast of England is Saltburn-by-Sea. A mile or so inland is
Saltburn Mine Water Treatment Scheme. The site treats the floodwater of an iron stone mine that closed
in the 1960’s. Like the surrounding landscape, illuminated by the glare of reflected light off the north sea,
Saltburn yellow ochre is lighter in tone than the other mine water ochres. The paint on the wall is an
ultra matt emulsion that resembles the material in its raw pigment state, it has no additional binders or
enhancers other than an organic cellulose medium. This flat matt surface conceals an unexpected
brightness and warmth visible when the colour is expressed in a transparent medium like watercolour.
Saltburn is in one of the few mining regions that remains active. A thousand meters under the North Sea is Boubly
potash mine, one of the deepest in Europe. An environment so remote that it doubles as a deep underground
laboratory suitable for hosting ultra-low background science projects, like the search for dark matter.
Deerplay Site 53°44 07.95 N 2°12 10.84 W. 1460m Mine Water Treatment Scheme
GPS photograph, Somerset archival paper, wood
56.5 x 33 x 5 cm
edition of 5

Saltburn Main / -357 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
Saltburn ochre in oil on canvas
167 x 137 cm
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Saltburn Main / -357 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
Saltburn ochre in oil on canvas
46 x 56 cm
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Saltburn Main / -357 Ordinance Datum Newlyn
Saltburn ochre in oil on canvas
46 x 56 cm
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Saltburn Main
Saltburn ochre emulsion on wall
dimensions variable
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TAN-Y-GARN
Tan-Y-Garn (Under the Mountain), South Wales
Tan-y-Garn is more remote than the other sites, surrounded by trees, tucked into the side of a high valley in
South West Wales. The deep orange ochre that forms here begins as rain water percolating through the rocks,
finding routes through the cracks and fissures of the former mine workings absorbing minerals on the way.
Eventually the mineral rich water leaches out from the mine adit at the base of the mountain, oxidising and
gaining its colour.
The water treatment process uses limestone and mushroom compost to reduce the acidity of the mine water.
The limestone raises the pH which helps iron oxidation and the mushroom compost supports bacterial processes
causing anaerobic conditions that prevent the limestone becoming clogged.
Tan-y-Garn it is a deep red brown. When suspended in water different colours are visible as the pigment particle
sizes vary. It moves between bright orange through to deep purple with a blood like brownish red that dominates
the final colour.
The mine here was worked until the early 1990’s, supplying fuel for the Port Talbot Steel works.
Tan-y-Garn Mine Water Treatment Scheme, from Google Earth

Red Lady, Tan-y-Garn
Tan-y-Garn ochre watercolour on paper
150 x 120 cm
48

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Red Lady, Tan-y-Garn
Tan-y-Garn ochre watercolour on paper
35 x 25 cm
50

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Red Lady, Tan-y-Garn
Tan-y-Garn ochre watercolour on paper
56 x 76 cm
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Onya McCausland is a British artist born in Zennor,
Cornwall in 1971. She currently lives and works
in London.
McCausland’s practice consists of minimalist paintings,
murals, installation and land art. Her work is concerned
with how specific materials and processes can be used
as a conduit to open up interconnected underlying
ideas that draw upon the changing economic and
environmental conditions underway in the
contemporary landscape. This is expressed in a
current body of work that examines new uses for waste
materials found in ex-coal mining regions across
the UK.
McCausland is collaborating with the Coal Authority and
UCL to generate new uses for mine water waste ‘ochres’
as usable coloured pigment for paint. Her research
repositions this ‘waste’ ochre as significant cultural
material that can be used to change perceptions of
post-industrial landscape sites.
In 2014, between 4 and 5 thousand tones of ochre
were being sent to landfill every year because an
economically viable use could not be found and landfill
was the cheapest option. By reusing this otherwise
redundant material in her work McCausland has
demonstrated the uniqueness and cultural value of
these colours and their landscape contexts.
The landscapes are perceived through the vehicle of
the earth materials forming at their site. The medium
of painting is used in its widest sense, drawing on the
history of minimalist and post-minimalist aesthetics,
and landart to examine the proximities between the
idea of ‘ground’ and surface, where surface is used to
join geographic, geological and painterly realms.
In collaboration with the Coal Authority, McCausland
is working to designate five selected Mine Water
Treatment Schemes as living paintings that perform
the production of ochre, while generating an income
for the local economy and producing high-quality
pigment for artists.
McCausland is currently working as a Leverhulme
Early Career Researcher based at the Slade School of
Fine Art, University College London working on her
project : “From Coal Mine Waste to Landscape
Painting - New British Earths” Recent exhibitions have
been supported by Camden Arts Centre on
London, Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall,
Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Delfina
Foundation in London. She was also
supported by the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trust and has
received funding from the Arts Council, British Council.
the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has also
been shortlisted for the prestigious Wollaston Award
at the Royal Academy and the John Moores Painting
Prize. She has exhibited her work internationally and has
work in numerous private and public collections. Onya
McCausland is represented by Anima-Mundi.
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Published by Anima-Mundi to coincide with the exhibition ‘Landscapes’ by Onya McCausland
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