photo by Maik Teriete
Balance
Rock: Miner Threat
Balance
Rock: Miner Threat - detail
Balance
Rock: Miner Threat- detail
Balance Rock: Miner Threat - detail
Marne
Lucas and Bruce Conkle at Balance Rock: Miner Threat
The
Gobi is a very surreal landscape. The main mines in the gobi are pulling
out gold, copper, and silver. Mongolia is being mined and developed at
an alarming pace- and has the fastest growing economy in the world, bringing
about corruption, environmental destruction, and economic injustices by
the truckload.
Mongolia
has enough coal to keep China powered for the next 50 years, as well as
huge quantities of copper, gold, silver, uranium and other minerals. It
is an unstable balancing act between the inherent wealth of the land where
people live and have grazing areas and clean water, and the wealth of
what can be extracted, bringing hard currency but rendering the land uninhabitable.
We
proposed to apply gold, silver, brass, aluminum, and copper
metal leaf on rock surfaces, applied with non-toxic adhesives to add brilliant detail to the landscape.
metal leaf on rock surfaces, applied with non-toxic adhesives to add brilliant detail to the landscape.
Coincidentally we saw this detail of a mining industry billboard in Ulaanbaatar depicting gold silver and copper.
The
gilded stones showed their colors best under cloudy skies.
Applying the delicate metal leaf in the outdoors posed many challenges- wind was a recurring one.