www.artlink.com.au > vol 34 # 4 [2014] | 35 Out in the humid regions of Central Queensland a new medium is being produced. A thick, red paste, derived from the earth and processed, is being baked in the sun and built up layer by layer to reinforce expansive dam walls. Over the course of time these walls will grow to become hills, and inadvertently emerge as a new, manufactured landmark dominating its local context. A vestige of the early 21st century, this form will embody a message for future generations, recounting the history of society; our soft drink cans and our window frames, our statues and our quantum clocks. It will remind us of the many hundreds of workers who journeyed weekly across the country in the name of industry. The mud is a neutralised and thickened bauxite residue, the place is Gladstone, and there are no artists. There are over 400 operating mines in Australia. As whispers of an end to the boom become confident murmurs, there is increasing motivation to reflect on what that means for the future of these innumerable sites and, more broadly, the state of the land in a post-mining future. Currently, rehabilitation of post-mined land focuses on restoring the site to its original ecological (but not aesthetic) state prior to the mining intervention. With a growing disconnect between satisfying ecological needs and envisioning an appropriate response to the landscape, there is a critical need for creative intervention. So, where are the creatives? Anti-mining activism has been a dominating force in the Australian visual arts community, but there has been little support for art to establish itself as a legitimate force within the post-mining process. As such, artists have forfeited their ability to influence the physical outcomes of the land following mine closure. In Australia, a tentative union between artist and corporation tends to be immediately disparaged and is therefore left unexplored. Nevertheless, there is significant precedent in the work of land reclamation artists that originated as an ecological subset within the American Earthworks movement active from the latter 1960s. These artists forged specific applications as a restorative influence within damaged environments. The movement lost definition as many branches of ecological art emerged, and over time it has become increasingly interchangeable, not only with eco and public art, but with the landscape architecture vernacular. Alongside this loss of unified identity, practicing land reclamation artists have, for many decades, been subject to the whims of politicians, with many works reliant on the fickle enactment of rehabilitation policies for exhausted industrial sites. Alongside American Earthworks, reclamation art is now in steady decline, paralleling the maturing of many of its primary exponents. Landscape architecture projects have since replaced the work of artists in most reclamation sites that experiment beyond ecological restoration. Whether because land reclamation art has been waning or landscape architecture has a better organisational structure for working with the mining industry, there is significant overlap between the works produced by these creative fields that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. A recent example of this can be seen in the McLeod Tailings 1 project for Barrick Gold in Canada by American landscape architect Martha Schwartz and in the newly opened Australian Garden constructed in a former sand mine in Victoria, Australia, by Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Paul Thompson. In contrast to the decline in reclamation artworks, a combination of industry-wide regulations, impending site closures and the growing pressure on mining operations to maintain a ‘green’ image, have led to a rise in ecological rehabilitation processes that cover complex scientific and engineering requirements. These address issues such as land stability as well as irrigation and species diversity, but do not respond appropriately to the less technical needs of the site. The enduring threat of a new Australian landscape fraught with the absurdist topography of engineered non-places looms large, and with it comes the knowledge that an intersection between art, design and science is crucial if the new post-industrial landscape is to respond comprehensively to its context. Amelia Hine, Philipp Kirsch and Iris Amizlev on building sustainable landscapes and land shapes from post-mining space Art and the post-mining landscape RED MUD