On 30 November, the Network for Environmental Humanities, in collaboration with the DURARE project Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts, will host a lecture by Peter Oakley (Royal College of Art), called Purity and Pollution: Concerning Gold Technologies Past and Present.

Purity and pollution

In the Western world, gold’s identity is intimately entwined with notions of refinement and purity. Gold’s physical incorruptibility has provided the symbolism for cosmologies, social hierarchies, and a host of classical and biblical metaphors. Yet the extraction and refinement of gold has always rested upon a range of technologies that are all, in one way or another, environmentally and ecologically polluting.

The transformation of gold ores into pure yellow metal has always entailed the periodic release of a legion of less desirable materials, including silt, mercury, cyanide, chlorine, and carbon dioxide. Over recent centuries, humanities growing capacity to disrupt ecosystems and physical environments has increasingly been put in the service of accumulating gold, often with catastrophic consequences.

Gold’s financial liquidity has both facilitated these events and identified a monetary equivalence for the contamination they engender. But the individuals and communities that pay the real price of gold are typically not those who reap the monetary rewards. Indeed, the cost is not only disproportionately borne by the most disenfranchised in any region’s population, but also by their descendants.

In its pure state gold is highly resistant to physical change, yet to reach this supposedly elevated position it comprehensively transforms the people and places around it. This presentation will consider how such influential non-human actors such as gold are able to exert such leverage and the problematic consequences of these dynamics of power.

Peter Oakley

Peter Oakley specialises in research on materials, making, and manufacturing. He is reader in Material Culture and Co-Lead of the Material Engagements Research Cluster (MERC) at the Royal College of Art. He specialises in ethnographic, experiential, and collection-based research focusing on materials, making, and manufacturing, especially relating to the production of luxury goods, prestige artefacts or artworks.

Oakley has conducted research on the gold jewellery industry and its supply chains, contemporary applications of traditional craft techniques and skills, the management and presentation of industrial heritage sites, and the adoption of new manufacturing and management technologies and circular economy principles across the creative industries. To inform these activities he has undertaken fieldwork in Alaska, California, China, Kazakhstan, New Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and across the UK.

His research has become increasingly focused on identifying, supporting, and promoting more sustainable creative practice. This has involved managing research teams with diverse expertise relating to different creative or academic disciplines. He is currently leading an AHRC-funded project, Carbon Measurement Tools in the Creative Industries, a rapid evidence review for the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS).