‘Pomace’ examines a recursive logic of extraction, a loop whereby people, industry, resources and semiotics are caught up in a cycle; the formation of dense resource deposits, their labourious extraction, the inevitable production of entropic waste and a compulsion to make use of this excess material, over and over.

The project specifically focuses on the history of the coal mining industry in Collie, a town located in the Gnaalar Karla Booja region of WA, where the artist’s family immigrated to from Italy in the 1950s to take up work as underground coal miners. With the last of the underground mines closing in 1990, and the open-pit mines and coal processing plants being earmarked for closure by 2030, Pomace attempts to broadly survey an ensemble of factors at play that constitute the waste-resource-waste-resource cycle outlined above. These include; the geological formation of coal through abundant amounts of dead vegetation being compacted with sedimentary rock, cooking deep in the earth over millions of years to form a fossil fuel; colonial and capitalist imperatives that drive the extraction of such natural resources; a newly developed 500MW/2GWh battery grid system built as a replacement for the old industry; recently subdued (but not entirely quashed) competing politics for nuclear power; archival documentation, mural art, and tourists centres that preserve and reproduce a semiotic legacy of extraction; and my family’s tradition of pressing olive oil. 

The show tries to consider the multi-scalar nature of extraction through a familial lens of olive oil production, connecting the two through the motif of pomace – the pulpy byproduct left over from the production process, the excess that remains after a lucrative resource has been juiced. As such, the project is interested in what happens to this pomace, how it folds itself within complex networks, and how its extractive logic continues to reverberate through new industry and culture.