On Fire: Climate and Crisis profiles contemporary Queensland art in a time of significant ecological change. It situates this analysis during the emergence of what fire historian Stephen Pyne describes as the Pyrocene—the fire equivalent of an ice age, with Australia as one of its major epicentres.
One year on from Black Summer, the devastating 2019-20 bushfire season, the work of fifteen emerging, established, and posthumous artistic voices are presented here to frame an understanding of this theory of a new, incendiary era, and engage with closely related themes of global warming and climate threat in this state.
Queensland is synonymous with its climate, its identity and culture frequently foregrounded by it. This has previously been described ambivalently: part extreme, sweat-inducing, clime, yet also idyllic, even benign, paradise. This exhibition pronounces instead a changing image: of increasingly precarious conditions within the Pyrocene.
On Fire: Climate and Crisis looks to the past, present, and future terrain of this situation – considering the damaging legacies of colonialism, how artists visualise experiences of connection and disconnection with the environment, and fire’s capacity for rejuvenation in keeping with the burgeoning Indigenous cultural fire movement.
