Painted by Water: What Water Does in the Dark

There are mountains in North Wales that are no longer solid. Inside, an entire world exists in the dark and I am going to paint it.

I have just returned from a week away with four long-term caving friends. All experienced cavers, we spent three days exploring disused slate mines in the area, including Cwmorthin, near Blaenau Ffestiniog. 

I have been visiting mines across Wales for many years, and this week has crystallised something I have been thinking about for a while. I am going to create a body of work inspired by these places: paintings that explore how water is changing them, dissolving their history, leaving its own marks in the dark.

 

 

The paintings will be abstract, worked primarily in acrylics, mixed with sand and gravel to build the kind of texture these places demand, the crusted mineral deposits, the rough-hewn rock, the slow accumulation of material over time. Watercolour and inks will play a part too, where the work calls for something more fluid and unpredictable. I'll begin with small studies, working from both my impressions, memories and thoughts following the trips and the photographs I took underground, before scaling up. The colours, shapes and textures of the water formations will be the heart of this work, but I may also introduce quieter echoes of what I found there: the outline of a teapot, the curve of a pipe, the ghost of a decaying truck. Hints, rather than statements. The vastness of those spaces may find its way in too.

Cwmorthin Slate Mine was worked from 1810 until around 1939 (brief history). It is now owned by Go Below Underground Adventures Ltd who run organised trips for those with a sense of adventure but no caving experience, allowing them to explore safely. Generously, they also grant independent access to experienced cavers, giving us the freedom to roam this vast and extraordinary place. 

The only light is the light we take with us. Head torches illuminate the passages ahead; powerful hand torches let us see into the vast, empty spaces beyond, searching out what lies in the darkness. Photography in these conditions is a challenge and a fascination in equal measure. Here, in the dark, water is doing things I have not quite seen elsewhere.

Water gets in everywhere. Rainwater seeps through the rock above, collecting dissolved minerals as it travels. By the time it reaches the walls, it is carrying something of the mountain itself. It trickles down in thin, gleaming threads, depositing those minerals as it goes, building formations that are intricate and strange and breathtakingly beautiful. Pale crusts, rust-coloured streaks, delicate crystal growths. On the mud floors below, each drip leaves its mark: a tiny crater, a colourful ring, a fragile pattern that will be erased and remade again and again. These formations are never still. They are a record of every drop of rain that has ever fallen on this mountain and found its way inside.

 

 

The mountain has been hollowed out. Enormous chambers, some large enough to swallow a skyscraper, open up in the darkness around you. Broken slate lies in vast chunks across the floor, shed from collapsed passages and roof falls. Railway tracks and trucks still sit where they were left, rusting quietly. Wooden beams sag and crumble, eaten by bacteria and slowly surrendering to the damp. You pass rooms that were once filled with noisy machines, stores for tools, explosives, or candles, perhaps a smithy for sharpening tools, or simply a shelter where workers could eat or take refuge, built underground to organise the working life of the mine. Old teapots. A pipe. The footprints of pit ponies. The small, human remnants of a place that was once loud and alive and purposeful.

 

 

Disused mines are not places most people will ever see, and that inaccessibility is part of what makes them so fascinating. Wales's mining industry shaped this country, and these crumbling places are part of that inheritance; holding their secrets quietly in the dark.

The mine was built on many levels, and moving from one to another feels like crossing into a different version of the same place: darker, quieter, stranger. Where streams run through the mine, tumbling from level to level, the sound feels exciting as it cuts through the silence. Getting between levels means scrambling down steep inclines, or rigging ropes to abseil down and prussik back up.

The work that water does in these places is quiet and relentless and utterly indifferent to the human history it is transforming. I find that profoundly compelling. There is something here about time and change and beauty that I need to paint.