This September Tavistock Guildhall Heritage Centre is delighted to host the Ruin River Exhibition - Mining legacy of the Lower Tamar Valley and Kit Hill by Graham Warren and Duncan Rice as part of our Mining Heritage Month.
This exhibition focuses on mining remains of the Lower Tamar Valley and nearby Kit Hill. These areas were once huge producers of copper, tin and other metals, as well as arsenic. The evidence of mine remains is clear to see on the open flanks of Kit Hill, but the Tamar Valley largely withholds it’s mining story, burying surviving fragments in thickets of plantation and scrub. A hidden River of Ruins.
The exhibition is part of ‘Ruins and Monuments’ project which has been running for over ten years. The aim of the project is a series of exhibitions in the former mining heartlands in the South West. Initially the focus has been the abandoned remains of the buildings and structures but gradually the scope of the project has expanded to include the landscapes transformed by mining.
“When we started visiting the abandoned mine landscapes we had little knowledge of what we were looking at. Over time we have come to know much more about the story of mining for tin and copper. But in a sense, this is beside the point. The initial emotional response is what provides the impulse for the project – the feeling of discovering the remains of Babylon in Devon and Cornwall.”
The exhibitions combine photography, drawings and paintings. The photographic equipment used is not far removed from camera technology current at the height of mining in the mid to late 19th C. The pin-hole photography takes a step further back but seems particularly suited to the stark qualities of the mining ruins. The drawings are made on site and provide the basis for paintings that combine observation with memory.
Graham Warren started taking photographs from about the age of 10 with his working life covering many technical aspects of the medium. Deciding to 'unlearn' the rules, he returned to basics and used a pin-hole camera for some of the work in this exhibition, essentially a box with a hole at one end.
'Using old cameras produces a unique result which led me to the pin-hole, in this case a Zero 2000 wood & brass model with a 0.2mm hole. This is not far removed from the type of camera in use when mining was at its height in Cornwall. Selected negatives from the black & white films were hand printed on Silver Based Multigrade Art Paper. Some of the images have an almost ghostly quality which suits the abandoned engine houses and mine works. These sites are special places, once an industrial heartland they now seem to have an evocative echo from the past and a magnificent grandeur in their decay.'
The exhibition also includes black and white images taken with a more conventional twin lens reflex camera with a lens and colour digital photographs.
Duncan Rice has combined a working life in landscaping with drawing and painting. ‘Looking back there seems an inevitable attraction to mine ruins and landscapes as a subject. I live in a former copper and tin mining area on NE Dartmoor that shares much in character with Cornish mining areas. I have become increasingly interested in the way nature finds ways to recolonise often heavily polluted badlands and reclaims them as remarkable landscapes.
I am self taught as a painter and much of my work is based on drawing direct from the subject. In contrast to this approach, I also make paintings in my studio shed which are based as much on memory and imagination as on factual records. Both types of work are included in Ruins and Monuments exhibitions.
The drawings use a mixture of drawing mediums on paper or card. The paintings are built up with layers of paint worked into textures, overlaid with colour washes.’
The exhibition will take place from 2nd to 30th September 2025, 10am – 4pm Tuesday to Saturday here at the Guildhall Heritage Centre.
Explore our mining heritage, and discover why Tavistock is the eastern gateway to the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, this September at the Guildhall Heritage Centre.
2nd until 30th September - Ruin River Exhibition - Mining legacy of the Lower Tamar Valley and Kit Hill by Graham Warren and Duncan Rice
Also check out other Arts events in Calstock, Exhibitions in Calstock, Fine Arts events in Calstock.
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