DARK HOLDING (Drawing with Jet)
Dark Holding is the title for my ongoing material investigation into Whitby jet as both drawing medium and subject. The project explores processes of transformation, loss and preservation through drawing, object-making and installation. Whitby jet — a finite material formed through the geological compression of fossilised wood and historically associated with mourning objects and protective amulets — is approached primarily through its physical behaviour. Fragments are ground into dust, washed across paper, rubbed into incised surfaces, cast, carved and polished. Through these processes the material shifts between fragment, residue and mark, allowing drawing to emerge directly from the properties of the jet itself.
Drawing here functions as a form of material inquiry. Marks are produced through abrasion, pressure, erosion and contact. Surfaces become sites of accumulation and loss, where traces of the material register time, gesture and transformation. Raw fragments are sometimes replicated through moulds before being irreversibly altered, so that absence and memory become embedded in the work. The project unfolds through iterative experimentation with scale, surface and form, allowing new works to emerge from the constraints and possibilities of the material itself.
As the project progresses, I have become interested in a constellation of ideas linking Whitby jet, black bile, and dark matter. Black bile, the hypothetical humour associated with melancholy in pre-modern medicine, and dark matter, the unseen mass inferred through cosmological observation, are both explanatory substances whose presence is (or was) theorised largely through indirect evidence. Whitby jet occupies a very different domain, but to me, it has strong resonances with these traditions of thinking about darkness as a material sign of what cannot be fully seen or measured.
This line of inquiry has also begun to extend the project beyond jet itself, prompting attention to other materials that share qualities of residue, trace and organic transformation. Substances such as hair, bone, bark, shells and other natural fragments are entering my practice as parallel carriers of time and material memory. Like jet, they exist at the threshold between the living and the mineral, the body and the landscape. Their presence expands the project’s field of investigation, allowing drawing and object-making to move between geological, biological and domestic materials.
Dark Holding received an Artists’ Bursary from a-n The Artist Information Company in 2025, which enabled initial research and studio experimentation. The project continues to develop during an AA2A (Artists Access to Art Colleges) residency at Leeds Beckett University (2025-26). Individual works arising from the project are documented separately in the Work section of the website. The first complete works are currently exhibited at Espacio Alexandra (Santander, Spain) until the 20th of March 2026.
