Series: The Quarry as Witness
Bauxite lens of Lake Darvash, Hungary
2022
The place
The Bauxite Lens of Lake Darvash is a former bauxite quarry near Nyirád, Hungary. Its deep red earth is the visible trace of a landscape shaped by geological processes and decades of extraction.
Bauxite mining in the Nyirád area began in the 1940s. The ore was extracted through underground mining and the pumping of karst water. The quarry was closed in 1977.
Today, the site is inactive. Its red slopes and exposed geological layers remain as traces of both deep geological time and industrial intervention.
The intervention
In 2022, R² made a small stag from cotton wool and coloured it with earth pigments collected directly from the quarry.
The figure was photographed within the red landscape and then left there.
There was no label, explanation, or protective enclosure. The small object simply remained in the quarry, exposed to weather and time.
The scale of the intervention was deliberately disproportionate to the scale of the site: a fragile handmade figure placed within a landscape shaped by large-scale extraction.
The stag was not intended as a monument to a particular event. It was a temporary presence — made from the colour of the place and returned to it.
The Red Stag from the Red Earth
Cotton wool, earth pigments from Darvash, thread, time. 2022
The work belongs to R²’s practice of Revealed Realism (RR): working with what a place already contains rather than imposing an autonomous form upon it.
Here, the quarry provides both the setting and the material. The pigment carries the colour of the earth into the figure, while the figure carries a trace of the landscape back into the landscape.
The work was left without protection.
Its duration was therefore determined not by the artist, but by the conditions of the place.
What remains is the image of a small red stag in the red earth — and the knowledge that the object itself was temporary.
Digital trace: Instagram: Bauxite lens of Lake Darvash