The Residues

We are delighted to present The Residues, a solo exhibition by artist Onya McCausland, developed in collaboration with CLOSE Gallery. The exhibition considers the traces left behind by extraction, and the possibilities that emerge from materials once considered waste. About The Residues presents new works by Onya McCausland, continuing her ongoing investigation into landscapes transformed by extraction, industry and environmental change. Her paintings speak to sites where the earth has undergone post-extractive alteration: landscapes in which chemical balances have been disrupted, materials displaced, and environments fundamentally transformed through industrial activity. McCausland makes her paintings using materials collected from industrial land sites, mine tailings and waste dams, transforming these residues into dense, site-specific colour. Through this process, industrial contaminants are reconfigured as contemporary painting materials carrying traces of the places from which they came and making visible the structural changes that have taken place within the earth’s systems. Her practice proposes a different way of understanding waste: not as something external to the landscape, but as part of its contemporary material history. McCausland’s deep engagement with geology, chemistry and site-specific research gives the paintings an unusual material authority. Their surfaces are not symbolic approximations of landscape; they are landscapes chemically and historically compressed into pigment. Burning, milling and refining the minerals alters their tone, density and texture. Subtle shifts in colour changes in warmth, opacity or granularity become records of process, geology and industrial history. The paintings operate less as images of landscape than as material documents, carrying within their surfaces traces of extraction, transformation and ecological aftermath. They hold the memory of places altered by industry while asking us to reconsider the materials through which landscape is understood. Read more Toggle Performance / Live Art Painting Multi-disciplinary Film / Video