Tailings is a formal exploration of the destructive beauty of mining waste. What does it look like when one act of deposition erases the one before it. Each piece in this series simulates a small patch of ground where discharge from one or more sources runs downhill, drops its sediment, and slowly buries its own tracks. Where two sources meet, their deposits compete. One run gets cut short, truncated by material that arrived later and from somewhere else. What's left behind isn't a record so much as the residue of forgetting.

This is part of an ongoing series called Disturbed Ground, which looks at the landscapes industry leaves behind and the strange beauty that shows up in them almost by accident. A tailings pond is a byproduct, a place where waste settles because gravity put it there. And yet from above, these sites can look like something else entirely. Organisms, wounds, watercolors, geology that hasn't happened yet. That gap between what a thing is and what it looks like is where this work lives.

The forms here come from thousands of individual strokes, each one a path a particle took before it ran out of energy and stopped. No single stroke matters. The shape only becomes legible in aggregate, the way a heap of tailings is really just dust that landed in the same place enough times to become a shape. The piece doesn't know it's making something. It's just depositing material until it can't anymore, and somewhere in that indifference, a kind of beauty shows up anyway.

Tailings is part of Disturbed Ground, a body of generative work made from industrial landscapes at the scale where extraction becomes abstraction.