Worth Its Weight In Gold: Dillon Marsh

The series explores a significant part of South Africa’s history; the mining of natural resources such as copper, gold, and diamonds, and the effect this has had on the land over time. In ‘Gold’, Marsh uses CGI to create a scale model of the total amount of gold extracted from each of the seven Witwatersrand Basin goldfields. For context, the Witwatersrand Basin is a geological formation responsible for almost half the world’s gold reserves. Marsh’s enormous gold spheres are juxtaposed against the land from which the gold is produced. The result is a poignant series of photographic images that speak loudly about our capitalistic demand for gold.

Marsh, whose copper series of the same theme we’ve featured previously on iGNANT, explains of his discontent with mines: “Their features are crude, unsightly scars on the landscape. [They are] unlikely feats of hard labor and specialised engineering, constructed to extract value from the earth but also exacting a price”.