When taking the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, I often see strange Martian landforms in the distance. They are reminiscent of Uluru in Australia, but their origin is quite different.
For a brief period in the nineteenth century, Scotland was at the centre of a fossil fuel boom. The chemist James Young (1811–83) discovered that it was possible to extract paraffin (i.e. kerosene) from shale rock. This fuel was used for lamps, replacing smelly whale oil, until petroleum came to dominate at the beginning of the twentieth century.
After being heated and treated, the black shale turned an orangey-pink colour. The spent shale was then dumped in the countryside, forming huge mounds known as ‘bings’.
Abandoned in 1925, quarried away as ballast for roads and football pitches, the Broxburn and Winchburgh bings went unregarded until 1975, when the artist John Latham (1921–2006) was briefly installed as artist in residence at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh.
Latham took the aerial view of the bings and saw in them unconscious monuments to the age of oil. He renamed them the Niddrie Woman to draw out their mythical resonances. For Latham, they were not simply waste products but ‘process sculptures’.
When I heard there was going to be an exhibition at Jupiter Artland inspired by the bings, I was keen to visit both.
I was accompanied in this by the novelist Chris Kohler, who hails from the area and even went to a high school named after James Young. His debut novel is about the spiritual impasse of modern Scotland and the dead hand of the Reformation. The next one is about mining … perhaps, I thought, the petrol would be tax-deductible.
It seems to me that every era has its theme. Whether consciously or unconsciously, artists are drawn to certain topics that capture the spirit of the age. In the medieval period, Christianity dominated. During the Renaissance, humanist confidence took hold. Romantics sought refuge in nature from the Industrial Revolution.
And now? All art these days is about climate change, even when the topic is barely mentioned. Climate change looms over our civilisation. It says: the world we once knew is ending. The weather is getting more extreme. The ecosystems that sustain modern culture are being destroyed.
Extraction was an attempt to wrestle with climate change by going back to the beginning of the fossil fuel era.
Carol Rhodes’ stark bird’s-eye view of the bings is a reminder that we have something most previous generations lacked: a view over our domain.
By contrast, the beautifully textured paintings of Siobhan McLaughlin use earth pigments taken from the land to embody extraction directly.
The most impressive thing in the exhibition was John Gerrard’s simulated gas flare, burning like a flag for our times, closely followed by Marguerite Humeau’s strange sculptural forms made from dead trees and honey.
While the exhibition was worth seeing, it made up only a small part of the Jupiter Artland experience. Elsewhere, it was fascinating to think about how other works have become relevant in the climate change era.
The most striking work is not in the exhibition at all. Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone Coppice, a collection of rocks embedded in trees, is fully alive to the fact that humanity is dependent on nature for support.
Overhead, a plane ascended from nearby Edinburgh Airport. Jet fuel is kerosene: the very substance that James Young helped extract from the shale.
As the heatwaves and wildfires ravage Europe, we are forced to face the unintended consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels. By connecting with the beginning of the era, perhaps we can find a way of going beyond it.
Extraction closed on 26 July. Jupiter Artland is open all year except January. Niddrie Woman will likely be around for at least the next millennia.
The bings extended across West Lothian. In the 1960s when I was a child they exuded a horrible toxic sulphurous miasma if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, as the unextracted oil residue in the shale continued to cook under the pressure of the weight of the shale above (the primitive extraction processes were inefficient by modern standards). Bathgate was the chemistry epicentre where the paraffin was refined on an industrial scale. I grew up just along the road from there.
Next time I’m up I’ll look out for them