Day 6, Carbon Sink

Over the weekend a pipe in the sprinkler system broke and the sculpture was flooded, but nothing floated away and work continued today.

More rubbish from newspapers trying to stir it. They ignore everything of interest which you tell them and print only what they think is sensational. Here are a couple of email comments to me from friends:

Looks like a wonderful piece. It's tough to take the spiral form and do something genuinely new with it, but I think you've succeeded. And the brouhaha around it is both unexpected but maybe sadly predictable, no?


Very, very interesting to see this work of yours, and what it's prompting; its own outwhirling vortex of implications, then. Importantly, too, it *looks* astonishing.

I have had quite a bit to do with coal in the past. I once did a project in Nottingham Forest and asked to go down the coal mines which are underneath it - the ancient petrified forests. A mile and a half underground - an hour getting to the coal face - the heat, the dust, the noise, the collapsed passageways, the wheezing lungs of pneumoconiosis, and the ghost story's the miners tell you; thousands of tons of coal mined with peoples lives, all to feed one power station which feeds the national grid at peak times like Christmas and 6.00 pm when everyone is home from work with a cup of tea and Neighbours on the TV.
Thatcher did for the miners, broke the unions by using cheap North Sea oil and gas and fought them in the pitched battle at Orgreave, between mounted policemen and miners with clubs and iron bars.

Then there was the project I did in Rebecca Hossacks gallery in the Crypt of St James church, Piccadilly. I installed Coal Chamber, an igloo of coal in the white pristine basement: something dark as a reminder that religion is not necessarily all sweetness and light, and that humans have a dark side. We opened the show, but the church took exception to it and shoveled it out the following day. The coal was donated by British Coal but sadly it wasn't even British as the politicians had put paid to that, it had come all the way from Columbia.

Tomorrow we will fill in the remaining seams between the logs with the black and beautiful coal of Wyoming.