COERCE COURSE & BLACK DIAMOND
Commission with the Burton Museum and Flow associates
Black Diamond
fabricated diamond made from Bideford black in high pressure high temperature machine
Sponsored by Heart in Diamond
COERCE COURSE
Floor from MMA fight. Plasterboard, Bideford Black
The Burton Museum, Devon, 2015
A year long commission responding to Bideford Black and by the intense geological process that created it. The raw pigment was placed in a high pressure high temperature machine for three weeks, which created a synthetic diamond. The diamond was exhibited alongside a framed floor, which was coated in the pigment and used as the base of a structure which housed an MMA fight. The floor holding the scuffs and scars from the high energy collision from the two fighters.
BIDEFORD BLACK is a unique, naturally occurring carbon based mineral, running alongside seams of high quality anthracite (coal) across North Devon. The deposits were formed over 300 million years ago when naked tree ferns trapped in log jams were compacted and buried down to about 8km beneath the earth’s surface by mountains built during plate tectonic collision. It was during this plate collision that the grinding and compressing of the matter formed the greasy clay deposits we find today as Bideford Black. Under compression, the organic mater has developed flat hexagonal platelets. This platy structure may have been exaggerated by the shearing and sliding action of the earth as it was compressed deep within colliding tectonic plates.
BIDEFORD BLACK is a unique, naturally occurring carbon based mineral, running alongside seams of high quality anthracite (coal) across North Devon. The deposits were formed over 300 million years ago when naked tree ferns trapped in log jams were compacted and buried down to about 8km beneath the earth’s surface by mountains built during plate tectonic collision. It was during this plate collision that the grinding and compressing of the matter formed the greasy clay deposits we find today as Bideford Black. Under compression, the organic mater has developed flat hexagonal platelets. This platy structure may have been exaggerated by the shearing and sliding action of the earth as it was compressed deep within colliding tectonic plates.