Eileen Byrne | Photography & Lens Based Media |
The Explosion Since I first embarked on this project, the passion has taken me over and every step I’ve taken in search of new information has let me in to a maze of revelations, no matter what way I turn I’m finding more little gems of knowledge each day. I guess from the day I entered the mine I became a miner myself, but it’s not just underground now, it’s people and their memories, it’s abandoned sites, archives, photos and maps, now I’m looking at my project with an “Ethnographical Lens”. From being under the earth a few hundred feet, it brings the fear of death upon me and that’s when I really came to understand my Dad’s love of the place. The adrenaline you feel when you come back up to surface lasts for hours. But there’s a strangeness in the beauty of the eeriness beneath the soil, I see faces in the carved out rocks and I feel the presence of those who died down there, it’s a humbling place in all its beauty and awe and when I’m there it’s a world away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life over ground. So now when I take my camera in there, I’m taking images of an unavailable landscape, as I map the intangible layers of this scared landscape I’m unearthing and revealing the beauty which lies beneath the holocaust of destruction. When I press the shutter release button on my camera it’s like pressing the button on a detonator because I can feel the mini explosions that go off in the bulbs to light this for-ever dark abandoned mine. The Aperture, the Shutter opening to capture the explosion to reveal a beauty that otherwise remains a secret. |