Coal Tree Salt Sea

Coal Tree Salt Sea is an inter-disciplinary body of work which began as an Arts Council Wales funded research and development residency in partnership with the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru in Ystradgynlais, near Swansea in 2015 (originally called Coal Tree). This started as a response to the area around Ystradgynlais, the place that Josef Herman called home for eleven years. Herman was mainly a figurative artist, yet he sought out the wild desolate places to walk and as Sarah found, Ystradgynlais is in an extraordinary, dramatic and culturally rich landscape. She walked alone and with people that know the place intimately, she also befriended an amateur archaeologist who had exhumed an amazing collection of items from the area. Some of these were shown in the exhibition, displayed alongside artworks.

Ystradgynlais was part of a very significant coal mining area, rich in seams of anthracite, central to people’s lives. The main piece of work that Sarah made was an installation in the landscape. A hollow oak tree filled with three quaters of a ton of anthracite, sited on a hill in Cwmgiedd nearby. The tree is ‘birthing coal’.

Sarah arranged a local May time event around the tree with Welsh folk music, poetry and a picnic.

There are ritual uses of coal as well as salt, both are symbolic materials which were carried to a new home when moving. Salt has a mining culture that has parallels with that of coal. This took Sarah to Poland to explore the salt mines of Wieliczka.

Salt (once known as ‘white gold’) is the Albdeo, one of the triad components of alchemy and has deeply symbolic connotations with purification and substantiation. It has been used in ritual processes over the millenia and coal (black gold) , born of putrification from drowned forests can be seen as an aspect of the Nigredo, it expresses deep geological time and metamorphosis.

The Coal Tree. Cwmgiedd. 2015

Exhibition at Arcade Cardiff 2016

Sarah has recently returned from visiting salt mines in Poland and then from Czech Republic where she made an installation in the grounds of Kampa Museum of Art, Prague, the ancient city of alchemy.

Black Gold, Nigredo and White Gold, Albedo

Exploring symbolic meanings in both Coal and Salt

“ Alchemical salt, like any other alchemical substance, is a metaphoric or ‘philosophical salt’.

Coal has alchemical characteristics; born of putrified matter; it can metamorphically transform again to the next stage which is diamond.

‘Allah Chemia’ ArcadeCardiff 2016. ( 24 phials, salt and coal ).

‘Charcoal Tree’. Sculpture park at Kampa Museum of Modern Art, Prague. 2016.

Arcade Cardiff hosted ‘Coal Tree Salt Sea’ in 2016, Abergavenny Museum held the exhibition in early 2017. It then toured to Oriel Q, Narberth in Summer 2017.

The installation ‘Allah Chemia’ was shown at RWA, Annual Open Exhibition in 2017.

There is an artist book to accompany the exhibition. See Shop for details.

“Allah Chemia” 24 salt carbon phials. Abergavenny Museum 2017

Ritual Archaeology . Archival Digital print. 2015

Coal Apples 2018. Porcelain and coal