Six Bells Burnt Ochre Oil Paint

Colour From the Mines Colour From the Mines is now established as a Community Interest Company at Six Bells which ensures profits from the sales of paint are recirculated back into the local community to support the work and build a sustainable programme of arts events.

The company is working with a further four ex-mine sites, developing their ochre wastes into usable colour pigments for paint. A process that simultaneously uncovers layers of sociopolitical history, along with the contemporary cultural and economic connections to place.

Six Bells is one of several mines in the Valleys of south Wales that became the UK’s earliest industrialised coal mines producing millions of tons of coal fuelling global trade. The paint therefore functions as a tool for examining some of the complexities of the wider social injustices of the global mineral mining trade in the context of the environmental emergency.

Ochre is the oldest of cultural materials with roots stretching back to the beginning of human history. The mine water ochres can be aligned with traditional historic ochre - a mineral that has been found sprinkled on cave floors, caked onto the buried bones of ancient humans; mixed with binder and turned into paint on cave walls, some 30,000 years ago and forming patterns on the built walls of early human settlements at Djade al-Mughara, Aleppo, Syria 11,000 years ago.