Of Embers, by James Tylor & Rebecca Selleck, Katrin Koenning, Tom Goldner & Angus Scott and Isabella Capezio is an exhibition exploring the cultural status of fire in Australia
The Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 are still smoking in the mind. Intensified by climate change, these ‘megafires’ left behind the largest burnt expanse witnessed on earth in the modern record.
Fire itself is pure paradox: essential for survival and yet capable of destroying life. Of Embers brings together the work of artists who have responded to this episode and the history and cultural status of fire in Australia.
James Tylor (Kaurna People, South Australia) and Rebecca Selleck’s Fire Country speaks to fact that fire has always been here, folded into Aboriginal knowledge and experience over millennia, existing within a totality of deep ecological and cultural time. Here fire is reconfigured from threat to natural ally in Indigenous cultural practice. Katrin Koenning’s photographs visualise an earthen poetics that rests in the polarity between ash and snow on Lake Mountain. For over a decade Koenning has watched and listened to the bush as it struggles to regenerate after the devastation of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Tom Goldner & Angus Scott’s photographs and video for Do Brumbies Dream in Red connect the paradoxical status of both brumby and fire in the Australian landscape and imagination. Isabella Capezio’s videos, photographs, found objects and ceramics for Feeling Loss address the perceptual slippage between the recorded image, the news media and the actual multi-sensorial experience of bushfires.
There are no images of the raging inferno in this exhibition. These artists portray the aftermath of fire and the consequences for landscapes and sensitive ecologies knocked off balance by human impact, now in recovery. Of Embers is a creative call for awareness that addressing this balance rests with us.
Event details
- Dates: 26 November 2022 to 5 February 2023
- Times of opening: Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm or Saturday and Sunday 10am to 5pm
- Venue: ArtSpace at Realm, Ringwood Town Square, 179 Maroondah Highway, Ringwood
Exhibition public program
Of Embers Pottery Workshop
- Date: Saturday 21 January 2023
- Time: 12pm to 3pm
- Facilitators: Isabella Capezio and Claire Lehmann
- Age Group: All ages (under 12s must be accompanied by an adult)
- Cost: $10 (all materials supplied)
Join Artists Isabella Capezio and Claire Lehmann for this all abilities pottery workshop. Isabella will talk about their work in the Of Embers exhibition, ‘Cinerarium: Vessels For Loss’ and their process for sculpting clay vessels in response to experiences of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.
As we witness and experience more severe effects of climate change on the places and environments that are important to us, ritual responses to ecological trauma feel just as necessary as the grief we naturally express for a human loss.
Workshop participants will have the opportunity to share their feelings about the current and future impacts of climate change on the places that are important to them, and to make their own clay vessel to take home.
Book online
Of Embers Panel Discussion and Q&A
- Date: Saturday 4 February 2023
- Time: 2pm to 3pm
- Artists: Rebecca Selleck, Isabella Capezio and Tom Goldner & Angus Scott
- Curator: Gareth Syvret
Join Artists: Katrin Koenning, Isabella Capezio and Tom Goldner & Angus Scott and exhibition Curator: Gareth Syvret for an informal panel discussion as they unpack their projects and the themes running through the Of Embers exhibition. Followed by Q & A. All welcome.
Further information
For further information on the exhibition contact Council on 1300 8 8 22 33.