Australia
Australia
Oil on canvas, 2020
190 x 220 x 3 cm
At the beginning of 2020, images of injured and displaced koalas appeared across the world’s news media. The koala became an extraordinarily powerful symbol of the non human consequences of the Australian bushfires and, more broadly, of climate change.
The koalas in this painting were based on real animals caught in the fires. I was enormously relieved to discover that several of the animals I had painted had survived after being rescued and treated. Others did not. One, known as Lewis, was euthanised because his burns were too severe and his suffering could not be alleviated. Many animals initially rescued from the fires subsequently died from their injuries.
I began Australia in response to those events. I was interested not simply in making a painting of koalas or of a bushfire, but in using the structure of genre painting to address a contemporary environmental catastrophe.
Historically, genre paintings depicted scenes of everyday life, but they frequently contained something more: a moral narrative, a warning, or the suggestion that something was about to happen to one of the figures within the scene. I became interested in whether that tradition could be turned towards the relationship between wildlife, human activity and climate change.
There is something particularly disturbing about placing animals within this kind of pictorial narrative. They are participants in events they did not create and cannot understand. The fire enters their landscape nevertheless.
When I originally wrote about this painting in early 2020, the world itself was changing. Human movement had suddenly contracted during the pandemic and, temporarily, pollution and carbon emissions were falling. At the same time, the Australian fires had made the vulnerability of other species to environmental change painfully visible.
I continued making paintings about the fires, including people and their animals sheltering on beaches while homes and landscapes burned behind them.
Writing about these works can make the subject sound strangely clinical. Perhaps that is because the reality behind them is so painful that language becomes inadequate.
It is all in the painting.
© Stephanie Fuller (Burns)