Extractive Ornament

What bodies of knowledge are intentionally and unintentionally revealed when an artist attempts to visualize a place of extraction? This essay considers this question through George Paulding Farnham’s Ptarmigan Vase. In 1901, Tiffany & Company’s lead designer became the primary owner of the Ptarmigan Mine, located in the Purcell Mountains of southeastern British Columbia. To promote his investment, Farnham fabricated a presentation vase out of the mine’s metals and included on its surface a conglomeration of symbols suggesting the metals’ origins. The elements of the vase’s construction, from the metallic lamination process of mokumé-gane to engraved symbols of fauna, reveal the mountain’s dynamic ecologies, devalued by extractive industry. By analyzing the design program, I argue that the vase visualizes paradoxical relationships to land that suggest paradigms beyond extraction, including Ktuanxa worldviews that are central to the First Nation’s fight to prevent further extraction in the region today.