A Lost Place

The bushfires which tore through Australia in 2019 and 2020 destroyed over 10 million hectares of land. Although I live in London, Australia is my home.

I watched the news of the fires from cold, rainy London, sick with anxiety as the flames came close to my parents’ home. Politicians faltered and stammered, unable to adequately address the question of climate change or the roles that damming, mining, and cola exportation were playing in this catastrophe.

The only way I could combat the frustration of this political impotence and the anxiety of watching my country aflame was to produce this photographic work. And so I took existing prints, now the sites of fires, and painted them with inks, reworking them in an attempt at representing my fear and anxiety through the images. The interference of my brushstrokes became a mirror of human intervention in nature, my own hand attempting to control the uncontrollable.