Dark Strata
Quin de la Mer, 2025-6
Oil paintings made with Coal foraged in Svalbard

Dark Strata is a series of oil paintings created with coal pigment gathered from the mines of Svalbard. Coal is the compressed body of ancient forests, a metamorphosis of ferns and trees into black stone across vast geological ages. When left in the earth, it is not only memory but also a geological archive: a keeper of carbon and ancient breath, holding the planet’s balance in its dark strata.

In Svalbard, coal carries a double resonance—once the fuel of Arctic industry, now a fading trace of human extraction. To paint with it is to feel both its quiet power and its violence: the beauty of ancient life still present in its mineral form, and the devastation released when it is burned.

This series seeks to hold those contradictions together—to honor coal as both forest and archive, and to grieve what has been lost. It is an invocation of geological memory and a mourning of what extraction has undone.