In the 1800’s, Virginia artist Sally Veach’s family members were among many in central Pennsylvania that leased land and profited from coal mining. Now those same mines in Center and Clearfield Counties are leaking acidic mine drainage, full of metals and minerals, into local waterways – turning them orange and killing aquatic life.
Her Yellow Boy project includes a series of drawings using ochre pigment made from Appalachian acid mine drainage sludge. One hundred percent of the sale proceeds will benefit the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association – the MCWA – which is working to clean up the legacy AMD pollution. The Moshannon Creek is a tributary of the Susquehanna River.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Veach about how the project began.
LISTEN to the interview
Sally Veach: The Moshannon Creek Watershed Association gave my cousins a tour, and then they sent an email out to the whole big family, and pictures of the orange water, the dead wetlands, the coal refuse piles. It was shocking and upsetting to know that there’s still environmental damage going on from my ancestors contribution to that.
Kara Holsopple: After you got the email, how did you get the idea to use acid mine drainage sludge to make art?
Sally Veach: I knew I wanted to do some kind of a project to raise awareness, an environmental project with my work. Somewhere along the way in my research, I just found out that it is iron oxide, which is the same substance as ochre. When it comes out of the ground and hits oxygen, what precipitates out of acid water is iron dioxide. So I found out that this orange substance, the sludge, you can make artist pigments out of, and there are at least two organizations that do this already in central Appalachia. I knew I was having a show at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Redding, Pennsylvania, and I knew it was coming up soon. So I went ahead and purchased some of the powdered pigments. I just decided I would make drawings out of this ochre from the acid mine drainage, and then as an act of atonement, donate 100% of any sales of those drawings to the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association.
Kara Holsopple: What is the process for making ochre, the pigment, out of AMD?
Sally Veach: Well, I’m not an expert. I’m still learning. I have already collected three different samples of sludge from different places in the Moshannon Creek Watershed. Basically, you just flush out any impurities, other substances, by just rinsing it and letting it settle. Then you dry it. So you can just pour the mud – it’s like mud – over a towel or something, let it dry and cake. Once it’s dry, you can grind it and then mix it with some kind of binder like gum arabic. And then you can just use it like watercolor or you can mix it with other types of binders, maybe linseed oil, and that turns it into an oil color.
Kara Holsopple: Is there any health danger to the artist using it?
Sally Veach: I was a little scared that maybe I would be contaminated by heavy metals. It’s not that toxic. Iron, I guess, is a heavy metal, but it’s not toxic. There are traces of other metals like manganese in the water that comes out of the local mines. As long as you don’t eat it or breathe it in, breathing in the dust could be a problem. Same thing if you’re using pastels.
This western Pa. stream is getting federal help to clean up its coal mine pollution
Kara Holsopple: What do the drawings in the Yellow Boy series depict?
Sally Veach: Lately, I’ve been incorporating textile patterns or other imagery into these gesturally expressive representations of the natural world. So textile patterns, human-designed, stylized imagery of nature, botanical illustrations from the 18th century. So with this project, I decided to incorporate images of mayflies, stoneflies, and brook trout. The brook trout is the ultimate goal. That’s like a super indicator of a healthy stream. And the drawings are very fluid looking. So it almost looks like they’re swimming through the AMD water. AMD is short for acid mine drainage.
Kara Holsopple: And even though it’s called Yellow Boy, the images are rusty colored, right?
Sally Veach: Yes, it’s funny, even the water is more orange than yellow, but Yellow Boy is what they call that sludge. In fact, it is an accepted mining term.
Kara Holsopple: So where does the term Yellow Boy come from?
Sally Veach: It was brought over by the settlers in Appalachia, who were some of the first miners, and they nicknamed the sludge Yellow Boy. I found instances of Yellow Boy all the way back to the 1600s, using the term to refer to gold coins.
Kara Holsopple: I read that you also used, as a part of the drawing process, a piece of coal. Why?
Sally Veach: During one of my tours with the MCWA, the vice president, George Franchock, picked up a piece of coal because there’s coal laying around all the old sites. He picked it up and said, here, would you like a piece of coal? Back home when I was making the drawings, I said, oh, here’s this piece of cold. I wonder if I can draw with it? So I just spontaneously drew a few lines onto this cotton paper. So the paper is a cotton archival acid-free paper. The coal is petroleum, which is not an archival practice. Even though the lines are very faint, you can’t really see them right now, over the years, it could discolor the paper more and the drawings become a time-based project in a way. The drawings are a living thing, like a bottle of wine that keeps changing.
The conceptual aspect that’s so exciting to me is that I spontaneously thought, ‘oh, this is exciting, I can draw with an actual piece of coal without thinking of the consequences.’ It was just immediate gratification. And the same thing happened with the coal mining in our country. Immediate gratification – money. People need to have money to survive, but it got out of control in the Gilded Age. They just came and scooped out all the coal under the ground without a second thought. And now we have this generations of acid mine drainage coming out and has contaminated half of the watershed.
Kara Holsopple: The proceeds from the sale of these pieces will benefit the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association. What does their work mean to you?
Sally Veach: They’re doing the work for damage that my ancestor is partially responsible for in leasing to the coal companies. I’m incredibly grateful that they are able to do that. They’re volunteers, they are experts in their field. They’ve gotten grants to create these treatment facilities, which is very exciting. So I thought, what can I do? Art is a way to impact people on a different level. It becomes more of an emotional experience, which is a different and a deeper level, I think, of understanding a problem.
Artist Sally Veach’s exhibit runs through October 12th at the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, Pa.
