Wildfires in Contemporary Art: New Directions for Eco-Aesthetics

This panel seeks to survey artistic responses in contemporary art to the increasing emergence of wildfires. While a range of visual motifs can signify climate change and environmental upheaval, wildfires are ‘burning bigger, hotter, faster and more often’ writes the journalist Edward Struzik. 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. The panel will ask whether it is enough to depict forest landscapes with florescent palettes, as we see in paintings by Kim Dorland? Or to salvage charcoal fragments from burn sites, as Cara Despain does for her carbon drawings? How do visual artists think about the impact of particulates on air quality and human breathing, as we see in Wanda Koop dystopian scenes. Do they address the olfactory effects of ashes in their installations and videos? The panel seeks new iconographies and experimental thinking in media as wide ranging as traditional easel painting to digital technologies. Independent scholars and curators, along with gallerists and artists are invited to contribute.

Building upon 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 seek to showcase iconographically rigorous art that demonstrates new directions for eco-aesthetics, allowing us to rethink this urgent topic.

The session format will be three 20-min research paper and three artist lightning talks via video link, and Q&A.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Alexandra Karl, PhD (Cantab), Independent, akarl@uoguelph.ca