Materialising Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires

This paper presents three artworks that responded to the Australian 2019–2020 Black Summer wildfires through experimental translations of environmental data into material and digital forms. The series engages with this catastrophic fire season through different vantage points: tracking fire growth and movement through mobile phone applications; embodied encounters with the smoke-filled atmosphere; and analyzing their planetary scale via satellite imagery.

Created over two years following the fires, the Slow Violence series (2020-2022) was made by hand-stitching burnt area maps into emergency thermal blankets. This process simultaneously destroys and repairs its grounding substrate that itself symbolizes both crisis and care. Satellite Cyanotypes (2020) reanimates satellite footage of the wildfire’s smoke that ‘lapped the Earth’. Made with a cyanotype printing process, it uses UV-sensitive chemistry that mimics how smoke blocks sunlight. Its shifting exposures reanimate the satellite gaze while grounding the work in the atmospheric conditions of its making. Shades of Black Summer began as the Instagram account sky.swatches, chronicling daily samples of the smoke-shrouded sky. The resulting colour palette captures the eerie atmospheric hazes that gave Canberra the world’s worst air quality and compiles these ephemeral tones into a chromatic archive.

Together, these works explore how reciprocal modes of making, between data flows, satellite imagery, atmospheric phenomena, symbolic materials and embodied artistic processes can create new visual vocabularies for representing fire as a potent register of the climate catastrophe.