I’m lucky to now live in British Columbia and the luxury that comes with that is the proximity to nature. I can drive for 1 hour, hike 30 minutes and see no sign of humanity.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve come to love the BC Wilderness. It’s very different to the Australian Bush I grew up in. The love is similar. What I have noticed is that for the people who live here, the need to be in contact with the wilderness is more common. The psyche is different.
Australia, where I grew up is often referred to as the sunburnt country. It is a place of extreme heat, yet I often craved the cold.
The burning of the natural environment here is some of my earliest memories.
In February 1983 at the age of 5, I was sent home from school as day turned to night. Ash from the Ash Wednesday fires hid that harsh Australian sun. As this occurred, (though I wasn’t currently aware of it) my grandfather was setting sprinklers on his Mt Macedon farmhouse roof and preparing to save his property and his livestock.
He did, but he never talked to me about it with me.
Wildfires (or Bushfires, as I grew up calling them) were as common an occurrence in Australia as in North America, and we were taught to fear them.
As well described in Edward Struzik’s “Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire” humans have learnt (and been taught) over the 19th till 21st centuries to see fire as the enemy, a destructive force that takes life and threatens our lives, belongings and homes.
The imagery created and the media’s perception is made to shock. It generates fear and anxiety.
What the media doesn’t push is the narrative of the remote fires, the scale, of the hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest/bush that burn away from the proximity of the general population. The only hint to the size of these fires is the density of the smoke that may be blown our way. Yet this gives no clue to their expansiveness, nor that these have been common for thousands of years.
As a photographer, I have long been interested in the juxtaposition of elements separated over time within an image. By pairing elements carefully, I can allow a viewer to pause, think, to transport their consciousness to a place and reveal a moment.
Conceptually this project came about as I learnt about the term Crossover. Winter was approaching and I’d just driven through one of the locations near Merritt in British Columbia.
At the same time, our family was in the process of accepting a tragic loss – that of a beautiful mind. The following 18 months became a quest to find what the future might look like. The monthly nightly walks provided time to pause and rediscover what matters. Coming out of this, the next time I saw my mother, despite her lack of memory of who I was, and the loss of the person she had been, I could see the beauty within her new mind.
This project has allowed me multiple opportunities. Explore and learn about the natural act of wilderness (bush) fire, get to know the British Columbian landscape further, take pause to understand the familial change occurring, and most importantly create a series of images that evoke the beauty that is a regenerating world.
