This work was created on Ngaamba and Gumbaynggirr country (NSW north coast). In acknowledging the traditional owners of this country I would like to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Firetides
One late-summer evening in early 2020 we each caught a small bream in the wild surf off back beach. As the sun sunk slowly behind a milky sky, spots of rain (and squadrons of mosquitoes) failed to dampen pleasant imaginings of the sweet meal we’d soon be enjoying back at camp. But savage pre-Xmas fires in the distant tinder-dry ranges and the subsequent flood debris vomited from the mouth of the Macleay River had take its toll, and the fish tasted just like the beleaguered Pacific from which it had been reeled. Between showers on the beach next morning a receding tide threw up contorted landscapes and fantastical places lost and found … remnant bushfire detritus ceaselessly, irritably re-arranged then erased … ashen geologies and spirit forms drawn from and by the slop and boil of the sea … as if the universe itself were re-imagining, reconstituting the scarred terrains and communities of our careless anthropocene.
Firetides comprises seven digital photographs + seven red interludes. The red hue was sampled from media images of last year’s fires.
The work is in two formats:
a durational piece, screen-based or projected [a looped 70-second sequence]
14 pure pigment prints on archival fine art paper [each 75 x 100cm]
The work is yet to be exhibited.