Hanging, Holding, Lifting and Folding

Hanging, Holding, Lifting and Folding unfolds from Christine Collins’ long connection to the mining town of Broken Hill.

The Broken Hill townscape is dominated by huge skimp dumps and mining infrastructure. A monumental black slag heap is within 100 meters of civic buildings and homes. Bush somehow persists amongst it all. The confluence of industry, community and bush is astonishing.

The mining of silver, lead and zinc generated great wealth and begat the town and BHP. A Miners’ Memorial sits atop the slag heap signalling the cost: lost lives, environmental destruction and dispossession. Hanging, Holding, Lifting and Folding responds with forms distilled from archetypal symbols of sacrifice, loss and survival: pieta, crucifix and resurrection. The gestures and shapes of which are echoed in remnant mining infrastructure; the crosses and angles of the headframe which lifts, holds and lowers the hanging ‘cage’, an angle roofed steel box which moves men underground.