The Dust and The Vein is an ongoing collection of photographs, centred around an individual spoil heap 600 meters above sea level in the Fells of the English Lake District. The spoil heap is formed of countless pellets of slate dust, extracted from the 300-year-old Honister Slate Mine.

Honister is the last working slate mine in England and as such, the spoil heap is never the same shape twice. With each tiny disturbance, the dust collapses and undergoes a complete metamorphosis making each photograph impossible to replicate. This fluid nature of the spoil heap acts as a visual metaphor for the ever-changing landscape it sits within, both above and below the mountain.

“Nicholas White’s eerie landscape almost looks like they are negatives at first, or even the moon. I admire his impeccable large format technique. The images have an austerity and a minimalism that makes you want to see them in real life. It reminds me of an engraving on a zinc plate, where the image is the ink of hundreds of thousands of little scratched lines. I also recall a master photographer, Harry Callahan, that I have learned so much from myself. His calligraphic black and white photos of reeds in a pond, riding that same line between natural form and abstraction.”

Todd Hido, 2020