At First, There Lay A Swamp (2022)
At First, There Lay A Swamp
January 2022 - June 2022
The project explores a community space and wellness destination that provides tranquil yet surreal baths to visitors in the derelict Chatterley Whitfield Colliery in Stoke on Trent. The bathhouse initiates a political discussion on the industry’s difficult relationship with public health and subverts ideas of ‘dirt’ and preconceptions of coal, retelling its narrative as the product of fossilised plants being subjected to millions of years of heat and pressure.
It encourages respiration and meditation through a ritualistic pilgrimage through a series of carboniferous ‘clean’ pools and ‘dirty’ peat baths. As visitors reflect on the life cycle of coal and how they too shall one day return to the earth as a form of carbon, the organically made bathhouse slowly begins to decay and fossilise over a period of a hundred million years.
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