A Lost Place

These images are a personal, heartfelt reaction to the dramatically increased global threat from destructive wild fires now hanging over us and the climate emergency that is the underlying reason for them.

Over the past few years, wild fires have wrought devastation in numerous countries throughout the world including Canada, the USA, Greece, Italy, Spain, and particularly in my homeland, Australia, which in 2019/2020 witnessed the Southern Hemisphere’s worst bush fires in recorded history. Over a three-month period these conflagrations devastated around thirteen million hectares, a land mass the size of mainland England, killing or harming three billion animals according to the World Wildlife Fund and causing a level of environmental destruction described by one commentator as omnicide. Meanwhile politicians faltered and stammered, unable or unwilling to address either the root cause of global warming or the extent to which damming, mining and coal exportation were contributory factors in this catastrophe.

 

The only way I could combat the frustration of this political impotence, the anxiety of watching the country I love so dearly ablaze, and the horror I felt at the appalling extent of death and suffering amongst the country’s native wildlife was to produce photographic work. The images feature preserved Victorian museum specimens of indigenous wildlife brought back to the UK by Australia’s colonising powers - serving as an ironic counterpoint to the contemporary living creatures we so patently failed to preserve in this instance - and my own archival images from my homeland, which I painted over with oils and inks, stripping them of their original peaceful quality, scratching and reworking them in an attempt at representing both the violent power of fire on that scale and my own fear and anger at such devastation. The intervention of my brushstrokes on the prints became a mirror of human intervention in nature, my own hand attempting to control the uncontrollable. This manipulation of the images is a way of implanting into them my emotional response at the continual destruction of nature whilst simultaneously attempting to find beauty and hope amid the tragedy of these lost places.