Shiner & Sailor

This series of bricks was carved from observation at the sites of nine former clay mines and brick manufacturers in St. Louis. Locations spanned from a hilly Dogtown neighborhood, to freight train tracks beside a probation facility overlooking the city skyline, to a garden maintained by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The locations were found thanks to a Missouri Department of Natural Resources map in the National Building Arts Center archives.  

Gilker Fire Clay Mine was active in 1896, and had 15ft pillars, a 7ft wide entry way, and a 140ft depth. A century of transformation unfolds, and the location now hosts an antique store. A grumpy man isn’t happy I’m there.  

Like the imaginative leaps one must take to see a now-commercial road as a dark tunnel where men dug clay, the carvings become new, shifting spaces into which one is invited to crouch down and enter, as if peering into a dollhouse.  

Spring 2024
Installed at G-CADD (Granite City, IL)

Photos by Roy Uptain