Once to the Rooftops of the World - A Narrative
This sequence of fine art documentary photographs aims to take the observer into a Welsh landscape shaped by slate quarrying since Roman times.
The industry became increasingly mechanised reaching a peak at the turn of the 20th century when half a million tonnes of slate was exported worldwide to provide roof tiles for the construction industry. The periods of war and striking unrest that followed thrust the industry into decline and quarries across Wales began to wind down and close. Few remain operative today.
The legacy of chiselled mountainous rock faces in shades of lilac, green and grey provide emotionally powerful backdrops to towns such as Llanberis and Blaenau Ffestiniog that nestle below. As time has passed, their looming dominant contours have become softened by erosion, tufted grasses and sapling trees - Nature’s attempt to dilute and claim back from Man the historical narrative of cleaving slate from the Earth.
These pictures focus on the more rapidly crumbling artefacts that supported man in his mining endeavours - the buildings, fencing and rusting metalwork - and seek to convey not just a sense of scale to an industry that changed the Welsh landscape forever but the very slow pace of Nature after fifty years to conceal the landscape wounds inflicted accumulatively pre quarry closure.
The industry became increasingly mechanised reaching a peak at the turn of the 20th century when half a million tonnes of slate was exported worldwide to provide roof tiles for the construction industry. The periods of war and striking unrest that followed thrust the industry into decline and quarries across Wales began to wind down and close. Few remain operative today.
The legacy of chiselled mountainous rock faces in shades of lilac, green and grey provide emotionally powerful backdrops to towns such as Llanberis and Blaenau Ffestiniog that nestle below. As time has passed, their looming dominant contours have become softened by erosion, tufted grasses and sapling trees - Nature’s attempt to dilute and claim back from Man the historical narrative of cleaving slate from the Earth.
These pictures focus on the more rapidly crumbling artefacts that supported man in his mining endeavours - the buildings, fencing and rusting metalwork - and seek to convey not just a sense of scale to an industry that changed the Welsh landscape forever but the very slow pace of Nature after fifty years to conceal the landscape wounds inflicted accumulatively pre quarry closure.
