Wildfire

With our gaze now focussed upward, artists in our second Viewing Room contemplate a warming atmosphere. Will we secure global net zero by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach? According to an ongoing study by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880, when warming was kickstarted in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The majority of that warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade. The repercussions of this warming are being felt around the world. On the week this online exhibition launched, a paper by the UN Environment Programme projected that episodes of wildfire will grow even more frequent and intense, with a global increase of extreme fires of up to fourteen percent by 2030, thirty percent by the end of 2050 and up to fifty-two percent by the end of the century. ‘The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes’, the report states. There really is no time to lose – the symptoms of warming outlined by artists below must not be our forever-realities.

Since 2011, photographer David Ellingsen has been working daily on a long-term project, an anecdotal archive of sorts, functioning as memory and recording – storing milestones of incremental changes in the global climate system. Nestled within this greater series, the photographs which make Wildfire began appearing unexpectedly, revealing accumulations emerging over time, now through the smoke from fires both local and global.

Victoria, in British Columbia, where the artist lives, has endured intense periods of atmospheric smoke since 2017. 2020 saw a record-breaking wildfire season stretching through California, Oregon and Washington. In Vancouver BC (58 miles from Victoria) air currents pushed the smoke north from the USA, and September 12 through 14 saw the air quality reach the worst levels of any major city on the globe. The smoke reached across North America and could eventually be seen as far away as Northern Europe – over 8000 kilometres (5000 miles) away.

The summer of 2018 also saw unprecedented wildfire events around the globe: fires broke out north of the Arctic Circle, California had both the first and second largest fires in their history, Greece had the second deadliest wildfires this century, and smoke from fires burning in Siberia crossed to North America affecting both the US and Canada. In his home province of British Columbia, the worst fire season to date took place, surpassing record-setting 2017 with a greater number of fires overall and a larger total area burned. A state of emergency was called. Wildfire smoke left some areas in the province with the worst air quality in the world and air quality alerts were issued as far away as Prince Edward Island on Canada's east coast, over 4000km away.

As the forests continue to dry with increasing temperatures, the artist expects this work will continue. ‘Welcome to the Pyrocene’, he exclaims.

David Ellingsen is a Canadian photographer creating images that speak to the relationship between humans and the natural world. He works predominantly on long-term, cumulative projects with a focus on climate, biodiversity and deforestation.

Ellingsen lives and works in the Pacific Northwest with a place-based practice formed by the landscape he grew up in. Intersections form a distinct foundation of Ellingsen’s practice – intersections of observer and participant, documentary photography and contemporary art, archivist and surrealist.

Ellingsen’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Chinese Museum of Photography, South Korea's Datz Museum of Art and Canada's Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Royal British Columbia Museum. They have been shortlisted for Photolucida's Critical Mass Book Award, appeared with National Geographic, and awarded First Place at the Prix de la Photographie Paris and the International Photography Awards.

About the
Special Jury Selection

Slow Violence

Slow Violence is a site-responsive intervention in which a glacier documents its own extinction. By strategically placing blue-tinted sheets of paper underneath meting areas of the glacier, the artist has allowed the ice to map its slow but steady disappearance. The unstopping, yet constant dripping of meltwater slowly washed away the blue pigment – a non-toxic water-based ink – creating images that are not only made by the agency of the glacier itself, but which contain their own history.

The intervention takes its name from Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), who describes it as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’

Born in Spain in 1989, Sbastida describes himself as a transdisciplinary visual artist working across installation, situated performance and video, investigating the intersections of cultural ecologies, geologic phenomena and climate breakdown.

His projects are often highly conceptual, developed from a synergy of scientific, eco-critic, and philosophical influences – including the post-humanities, the natural sciences, environmental activism and post-colonial studies. Through an interrogation of anthropocentric cosmologies within the context of contemporary nature-cultures, his work seeks to generate ‘spaces for critical reflection around concepts of sustainability, and to provide perspectives of belonging, cross-contamination and mutuality in our relationship with the Earth Organism.’

Miguel Sbastida is based in Madrid (Spain), and his work is represented by LMNO Gallery, Brussels. Sbastida graduated from an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015–17), with the full support of a scholarship from La Caixa Foundation. He completed a BFA at Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2007–12) with time studying in the Netherlands (2011) and Canada (2012). His practice has been awarded several prizes and grants.

Metaphorical Antipodes

Here, Russell has sculpted icebergs based on calving glaciers in Ilulissat, Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. They were formed into moulds, filled with water, frozen, and photographed against a backdrop of the imagery that inspired them. The moulds were cast into glass, a fragile medium that mirrors the ephemerality of the ice itself.

In her own words, ‘my process is dependent upon the weather and its unpredictability is one of many causes for concern. I fabricate landscapes as if these actions will be the only versions left once the icecaps are gone. There is a sense of urgency in documenting the disappearances of places in peril as this affects everyone, despite our political, geographical, and cultural differences.’

Metaphorical Antipodes explores opposites and extremes in location, age, attitude and knowledge. Most simply, it shows how “here” effects “there” and “there” impacts everywhere. This concept is represented through constructing fabricated landscapes and documenting their exact locations on Earth. The first chapter of the project, The Arctic Circle and Antarctica, focusses on climate change and the impacts of global warming as seen in Greenland, Iceland and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The globe is featured prominently, appearing as a split form and encased in ice, alluding to a melt pond. It is a symbol for the antipode, directly referencing the word’s origins as a point of opposition and a stand-in for humanity and its fragility. Icebergs are reformed into ice and glass. The moulds melt on large archival pigment prints in a backyard in the American Midwest. The glass sculptures are a permanent replication, however, they too are constructed of easily shattered material. Russell writes, ‘I rebuild natural phenomenon from half a world away and watch it fall with the same helpless observation after learning yet another irreplaceable iceberg calved near the Poles.’

Born in Idaho, Jacinda Russell is a conceptual artist with a longstanding interest in edges, borders, and topographical extremes, exploring the impacts of human-accelerated climate change in the polar regions. Currently, she lives in Indianapolis and works as an Associate Professor of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

Russell works primarily in the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, and bookmaking. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Texas Gallery, Houston Center for Photography, and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. She is the recipient of the DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award of the Arts Council of Indianapolis, Indiana and the Photographic Arts Council / Los Angeles Research Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography. She received her BFA from Boise State University in Studio Art and her MFA from the University of Arizona.

Meet the Jury

Joseph Calleja artist

David Cass artist & co-founder of A La Luz

Luce Choules artist & writer, founder of TSOEG.org

Inés García artist

Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar artist & co-founder of A La Luz

Begoña Izquierdo biologist & activist

Anna Macleod artist

Miranda Massie director of The Climate Museum

Elizabeth Monoian & Robert Ferry founders & directors of the Land Art Generator

Yasmine Ostendorf founder of the Green Art Lab Alliance

In the Heat of the Moment

How do climate scientists, working on the front line of a problem that’s invisible to most of us, respond to it as human beings, as citizens of this planet?

Feeling the Heat is presented as a visually spectacular triptych featuring rare thermographic imagery of natural and built environments and, in between, climate scientists interviewed with their own thermal imaging equipment. They’re literally feeling the heat of the moment.

The work explores a new approach to climate change communication, freeing normally objective professionals to talk to us in a subjective, even passionate manner. How do the disturbing implications of climate change affect the scientists tasked with studying it on a personal level? Despite the existential dimensions of their research they’re usually expected to eschew emotion, adhering to detached, dispassionate modes of the scientific method lest it taint their empirical assemblage of evidence. But even when they do so, they may find themselves targets of those who would rather not hear their rationalised conclusions.

The artwork forms part of Adam Sébire's PhD research into aesthetic visual representations of climate change. His collaboration with climate scientists uses a thermographic imager normally employed to measure leaf temperatures during heatwaves. The infrared thermal interviews “cloak” the scientists visually as heat data, allowing them to speak candidly and personally, whilst engaging a wider audience.

There is increasing literature documenting scientists’ despondency (climate-related depression). Clive Hamilton describes them as “modern-day Cassandras” whose warnings go unheeded. Their research often requires them to think the unthinkable as they venture to the far end of probability curves. Their recommendations follow the Precautionary Principle – hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Yet the science of climate change is all too frequently eclipsed by its politics and the temptation of some is to shoot the messenger. Any expression of an emotional response to a problem which threatens to make the planet unliveable for many of its species therefore remains taboo, and climate science communication is largely confined to probabilities, tables, graphs and data.

Scientists, for their part, often assume that given enough of the right information people will modify their behaviour accordingly. However climate change is proving that a response takes more than knowledge of the scientific consensus. Psychology research suggests an emotional connection is necessary. For a problem with such major implications, a dispassionate presentation of evidence may not help its societal acceptance. And so this work offers viewers a different point of entry.

Sébire is interested in the everyday (im)perceptibility of global warming to those of us living typically hermetic existences in the West. Insulated from the vicissitudes of weather it’s easier for us to ignore looming climatic upheavals when there’s little or no direct experience of them to confront.

The effects of climate change are furthermore displaced from their causes both in time and in space, creating a cognitive dissonance in our ways of thinking about the problem. Its difficult spatio-temporal dimensions lead philosopher Timothy Morton to conceptualise global warming as a vast hyperobject, demanding new aesthetic approaches which straddle the visible/invisible, here/there, and past/present/future.

And so Sébire uses thermography (infra-red heat photography) to explore the sensory imperceptibility of anthropogenic warming. ‘As part of my search for an aesthetics for the Anthropocene I struggle with these extremely cumbersome and low-resolution, yet fascinating scientific instruments. My models and I must shoot at night: the camera is uninterested in visible light, and in the lower temperatures after sunset I noticed that human bodies “illuminate” the surrounding environment with their radiant heat, a metonymic visualisation of how some members of our species are rapidly warming the planet.’

This photographic series (Lambda prints on Endura Metallic paper) is part of an ongoing (2015– ) interdisciplinary science-art project. ‘The artworks are created with a high-resolution thermal imaging camera loaned from scientists at the Climate Change Cluster (C3) and School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney – to whom I’m enormously grateful for their advice, trust and generosity.’ We’ll hear again form Sébire in Viewing Room III.