SESSION: Wildfires in Contemporary Art: New Directions for Eco-Aesthetics
This panel features contemporary artistic responses to the increasing emergence of wildfires. While a range of visual motifs can signify climate change and environmental collapse, wildfires are ‘burning bigger, hotter, faster and more often’ writes the journalist Edward Struzik. Indeed, fire historian Stephen J Pyne argues that we currently find ourselves in the Pyrocene, an era that has formed because of the Anthropocene. In recent years, several cities around the world, from Paradise CA to Lytton BC to Varnavas GR have been scorched and razed, in addition to extensive swaths of wildlands and the animals they contain.
This panel will look at how contemporary artists have responded to this phenomenon and what visual vocabularies have emerged. We will consider a range of questions, such as what palettes or materials are used? Do visual artists think about the impact of particulates on air quality and human breathing? Do they address the olfactory effects of ashes in their installations and videos? Have metaphors of fire changed from earlier readings in the History of Art to new signifiers of doom and demise? The panel seeks new iconographies and experimental practices in disciplines as wide-ranging as easel painting and digital technology.
Building on Malcolm Miles’ 2014 book ‘Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change’ (Bloomsbury Academic), the panel will adopt a critical approach and showcase visual art that demonstrates new directions for eco-aesthetics, allowing us to rethink this urgent topic.
Session Convenors:
Alexandra Karl, PhD (Cantab), Independent
Session Speakers:
Russ Brausch, Independent Painter, Bozeman Montana USA
“Only You“ 2025 Exhibition at Montana State University
Only You’ was an exhibition that took place in 2025 at the Helen E. Copeland Gallery at Montana State University. In it, some of America’s most picturesque landscapes were referenced, yet were transformed by torched meadows and skies of billowing smoke. Specifically, the serenity that Americans associate with these sacred spaces is pierced with bewildered wildlife, exhausted firefighters and colossal water bombers. Sadly Smokey-the-Bear, a beloved American mascot became a portent of doom.
The absence of indigenous cultural fire with growing climate change, on top of a century of fire suppression has ultimately led to the issues we face today. My work aims to expand on both, acknowledging and redefining America’s relationship with wildfire through the traditional western art genre. The creative process offers me a way of illuminating the complicated narrative of forest history combined with the reality of landscape. Constructing pieces through various processes of painting, burning, drawing, and textile offers different entry points into the wildfire conversation.
Simona Pagano, PhD student, Department of Arts, University of Bologna
Fire and Ashes. Artistic Pyrogeographies of Campania’s Landscape
This paper will focus on two artists who work in Terra dei Fuochi (Land of Fires), an area located in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, outside Naples, and has long been scarred by waste incineration and environmental neglect. Yasmin Smith’s Terra dei Fuochi (2021) transforms ash from contaminated soils into porcelain glaze, and Anaïs Tondeur’s Living Herbarium (2023) captures radioactive traces of plants in photographic prints.
By combining these two artists, this paper frames Campania as a “pyrogeographic landscape.” It is argued that the site articulates eco-aesthetic vocabularies around fire, combustion, and environmental transformation. Here, fire acts as both agent and symptom of ecological breakdown. Yet, from these ashes, new meanings and forms of life emerge. Extending to a broader constellation of regional practices, a local passion for fireworks will be juxtaposed with the destructive potential of Mount Vesuvius. It will be shown how fire operates as a language of destruction and ashes as a medium of renewal. By placing these artistic interventions in dialogue with ecological theory, new frameworks emerge to understand wildfire as a phenomenon rooted in Campania’s culture and environments.
Anna Raupach, PhD, School of Art & Design, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University
Materializing Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires (Online)
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.
Alexandra Karl, PhD Independent Art Historian (Canada)
In Memoriam LUKE SILVA (1999– 2024)
The life of Luke Silva was encircled by wildfire. Luke lost his family home to the Portugese wildfires of 2017 and witnessed the psychological fallout of those events on the stability of his family members. The loss of property precipitated his family’s move to England. Silva was deeply affected by the psychological impact and decline of his family. He attended the School of St. Martin’s in the Fields, and there incorporated wildfire into his painterly language and personal expression. He produced several powerful wildfire panels between 2020 and 2024, which are available on his website. These depict the panicked flight from fire, the ravages of fire and the power of an uncontrolled flame. His 2024 exhibition ‘Interface’ at Sherbert Green Gallery used the dynamics of the gallery’s layout to juxtapose a sleeping, unassuming figure with a nearby window onto an apocalyptic scene. Silva was drawn to the conflicting nature of fire: the attraction of its warmth and the deadliness of its burn, it’s “ability to draw you in with disastrous consequence.”
Claire Quianyu Zhou, PhD Student, Institute of Archaeology, University College, London
Cai Guo-Qiang, Arc’teryx and the Aesthetics of Ecological Risk on the Tibetan Plateau
This paper examines Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2025 fireworks performance in Tibet, sponsored by the outdoor company Arc’teryx, as a case study in the aesthetics of ecological risk. Staged across the Himalayan plateau and presented as a celebration of mountain culture, the event framed Cai’s signature use of gunpowder within a fragile high-altitude ecosystem. Its imagery of ignition and ascent evokes both creative transcendence and environmental precarity, raising urgent questions about how contemporary art reconfigures fire as spectacle in the age of the climate crisis.
By situating this event within the panel’s theme of ‘wildfires’, the paper interprets Cai’s pyrotechnic art as a paradoxical form of eco-aesthetics: fire appears not as a natural catastrophe but as a commodified, brand-aligned performance. Through visual and media analysis, the Arc’teryx collaboration translated the aesthetics of the ‘wild’ into marketing imagery, transforming fire into a symbol of adventure and purification while overlooking the material consequences of combustion and debris.
Drawing on theories of eco-aesthetics and heritage transformation, the paper argues that Cai’s fireworks expose the entanglement of art, commerce, and ecology. Fire becomes both medium and metaphor, signifying creation and destruction, spectacle and erasure. In this sense, Cai’s Tibetan pyrotechnics exemplify how contemporary art participates in the re-imagining of wildfire as a site of beauty, crisis, and ethical contradiction.