Sample 3/6, Zabzak, Adit#5, from the series 'Laguard', 2010–2015

Pieter Paul Pothoven (1981, the Netherlands) engages with historical sites, resources and artifacts with a view to exploring their relationship to Western visual culture. These works are photographic prints of wafer thin slices of lapis lazuli: the precious blue mineral found in the remote Sar-i-Sang mines of Northern Afghanistan. This natural resource is used to produce ultramarine blue, the finest of blue pigments used in European painting before the introduction of synthetic ultramarine. Following in the footsteps of German geologist Karl Bückl - in 1936, the first person to have photographed lapis lazuli - Pothoven travelled to Afghanistan to map the source of this pigment. The resulting works, with titles reflecting the names given to the stones by their miners, represent the origin of coloration historically used in Western imagery and a geological footprint of the region from which the blue stone hails.