ARTIST Graeme Armstrong spent months grinding down rocks to use as pigment for his photographs, even converting a treadmill to do the job for him.
After receiving the 2024 Open Cut Commission Grant, which is offered by the Broken Hill Art Gallery and sees artists receive funding to assist with a creative project, Armstrong embarked on ongoing experimentation to be able to use local minerals to colour his work.
“It took three months to get any image at all,” Armstrong said.
“I didn’t have any expectations, for a while I thought it might be impossible.”
Armstrong moved to Broken Hill for a job as a biologist with National Parks and limited himself to using local minerals from only the Broken Hill area in his printing process.
Though his father was a photographer, and he’d studied a diploma of photography at RMIT in Melbourne in his youth, he’d barely picked up a camera in 40 years before moving to the area.
“I did a year of my diploma, but I was only 16, and there was partying to be done,” he said.
After moving to Broken Hill, he purchased a digital camera and began photographing around the region, and then decided to experiment with tin type photography, a method of creating a negative directly on a sheet of metal that was popular in the 19th century.
“I had a camera from about 1910 just sitting around, but it wasn’t very good, so I bought a 4×5 camera,” he said.
“Then I saw a guy in Spain grinding up rocks to make pigments, so I thought I might try that and ended up doing these.”
The result of his experiment was an exhibition at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery called Terrigenous, which refers to something of or produced by the earth, last year.
He used minerals from throughout the region, even using slag from the Line of Lode to produce work.
He said the Potters Society had been using a treadmill to grind rocks for their ceramics, which he tweaked so that he could put rocks into a container, and they could be rolled around and ground down even more.
Now he’s working on replicating the process but applying two colours rather than one.
“The skill is in aligning them because you’re doing several layers,” he said.
“What I’m interested in is portraiture, to do rock prints of people’s portraits.”
Those interested in having their portrait made can reach out to Armstrong by texting him on 0413 109 256.
