CARBON

In 2020, I returned from a 5,000-kilometer journey from Queensland to Victoria, following the colossal trail of Australia’s Black Summer Fires. The 2019-2020 Black Summer Fires unleashed an apocalyptic scale of destruction—incinerating over 18 million hectares, obliterating entire ecosystems, displacing or killing an estimated 3 billion animals, and casting a choking blanket of smoke across continents. It was an inferno unlike any in recorded history.

It felt like I had stepped into the darkness of Earth's secret language, one that only the dead could know and I had forgotten.

On return and grappling to adjust to the city's feasting and economic beliefs, I withdrew to the studio. Then, I stapled a large raw canvas to the plaster wall and began a cathartic release by gorging it with wood that I had burned earlier and made into large, blunt charcoal sticks. It was night, and under the bright moonlight, I shut off the lights and let myself return to that dark, seared forest and my ancestry. With the studio as a dark box with an aperture for light, I connected to the many so many that had perished in or lived to witness and did not stop until all the charcoal had run out.

When I removed the canvas from the wall, it held fine charcoal dust fragments that had passed through the fabric— clinging to the wall, and I felt the barrier, its shadow and the beasts in the forests of silence after the burn—an impression rising like smoke through the bluegum, angels, summer’s ash and thunder of resurrection.

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Available as 210cm x 297mm & 100cm x 120cm Prints

To inquire about purchasing prints,please contact me via email.

For further information on this project please contact the Studio

All images © Alan McFetridge