Arise Therefore - an allegory

ARISE THEREFORE - an allegory

2025 - Photographic installation - assemblages of risograph prints on A3 sized paper - various dimensions

Returning to familiar sites in the years following the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires on Australia’s East Coast, I came to witness their impact on environments which had been quite literally reduced to silence. While these events took place in what is traditionally known as the fire season, their scale and ferocity had unmistakably been abetted by human hands.

Yet, the following years, a process of regeneration took place. Bright new grasses and shrub grew to a dense new undergrowth through the scorched forests. Amidst the expanses of blackened trees some appeared to have withstood the flames: fragile epicormic growth shot through their charred trunks – an uncanny sight both marvelous and monstrous.

The images that constitute this body of work are an attempt at “portraying” the resilient strength and irreducible vibrancy of the multitude that is a forest, in the aftermath of catastrophe. Their aim is to give a sense of the vital force that traverses and transforms those ravaged landscapes.

Through a process of re-assembly of infrared images printed in low resolution halftone, it is the act of recomposing, of putting back together the fragments into monumental figures that matters more than the represented subject matter. While the images “bear witness” to a past catastrophe, in an allegorical sense, they point at another horizon in a gesture against lassitude and discouragement, a summoning of forces of defiance against the storms that are unleashed.