A tantalising detail from Leaf Litter, Julie Mia Holmes.

On show at Embers, Epicorm II







From the ashes of Black Summer, to the green flourishes of epicormic growth, Eurobodalla’s artists have quietly, but powerfully explored our region’s experience of bushfires and their complex, protracted aftermath.

Last winter, a group of Eurobodalla artists took their cross-regional exhibition Embers, Epicorm: Art of the Eurobodalla to the Big Smoke in Sydney.

Presenting highly personal responses to the bushfires and their aftermath, the show was exhibited at the fittingly named Incinerator Art Space in Willoughby, on the lands of the Gamaragal People.

The gallery ‘strives to offer the community a hub for showcasing exceptional, innovative and timely visual arts exhibitions.’ And the exhibition was certainly that!



Discover more about Embers, Epicorm: Art of the Eurobodalla and its inaugral debut in Sydney.

https://www.printcouncil.org.au/epicorm-art-of-the-eurobodalla/







Now this important show has a second life and a fresh moniker. Its much awaited second iteration – Embers, Epicorm II is back home here on Yuin Country at the BAS Gallery in Moruya.

On show are works by seven of Eurobodalla’s outstanding visual artists: Cheryl Davison-Overton, Mirabel FitzGerald, Jennifer Hawkins, Julie Mia Holmes, Raewyn Lawrence, Amy Schleif, and Jo Victoria. Read about the artists

Make sure you see this incredibly moving and inspiring exhibition! It has added resonance, as we endeavour to find ways to self-care and position ourselves with forecasts for an el nino summer predicted for 2023.

Embers, Epicorm II at the BAS, Moruya

6 May-4 June 2023

FEATURE Interview Artist – Julie Mia Holmes







To mark the homecoming of Embers, Epicorm II WOOEE dials back to an interview with printmaker Julie Mia Holmes, one of the seven artists featured in the exhibition.

The interview was recorded with Julie just six months after the last of the Forever Fires were declared out.

It captures an important moment in local experience. And traces both the literal and existential tidelines observed by the artist. The larger trajectories that impact our world, and the seemingly opposed process of holding hope and destruction in the same hand, are also spoken for, in the ‘little things’ Holmes draws and brings to our attention.



WOOEE: Hi Julie, could you tell us about the Burnt Offering series of lino cut prints you produced?



JMH: Watching the burnt debris from the Durras fires in December sweep down the coast and wash up on our local beaches further south was a sobering experience and a sign of what was to come our way.



Dead birds, thousands of lady beetles like little red warning signs, burnt leaves tinged with bronze, larger branches.



It was devastating, grief becoming visible, and so graphic in quality.



If you happened to look at Instagram over the summer you’d be hard pressed to miss this sight, everyone was sharing it.

I memorialised it in a large linocut, carving the leaves and debris from the tideline out of the plate so when printed they were floating white shapes on a black background.







lino cut 93 x 63cm









Burnt Offerings 2 Plates, 2020, Julie Mia Holmes

linocut, 93cmx63cm



The piece needed to be big too. Something physically labour intensive to keep my mind off the trauma at hand and also to represent the scale of the disaster confronting us. One of the largest plates I have carved, it measures 93 x 63cm.

Going to back to work at Moruya Books during this time was confronting and exhausting. Friends and customers shared their stories and trauma, their lost homes and belongings, their grief.

We heard it all, took it all on. I would come home and carve the plate, their stories fresh in my mind. A memorial for all things lost.

It kept me sane and anchored.

Months later we still feel the trauma, things far from over. The recent rains, a small reprieve from the drought we have been suffering. I was starting to dread the summer but the rain has eased my anxiety a little.

The ghost print is a second Burnt Offerings linocut plate. Inked once and printed a second, third and fourth time without re-inking, each becoming lighter in tone than the last. I’ve started to work back into them with a graphite pencil with detailed drawings of the burnt leaves and debris. Scars. Traces.

The ghosts of the summer have not left. They lurk in the periphery waiting to catch us out.

What did you see at your local beaches and waterways after the fires?

After the first heavy falls of rain we had directly after the fires, a distressing amount of flotsam and jetsam washed up on Shelly Beach near the Moruya river mouth. Molluscs, sharks, fish, rays, so much carnage.

I believe it occurred from a mixture of the ash run off from the fires and heavy rainfall flowing into the sea in a large toxic amount, affecting the water ph and oxygen content. Everything is connected. But don’t quote me on that, I’m no scientist. I can only observe, and I do a lot of that.

Photo – Julie Mia Holme

Like everything else this summer, the scale was far too great. Molluscs are health indicators of the acidity of the oceans. They are a carbon based organism, just like us. And just like us they stick to their places of safety.

I have never seen so many fleshed out molluscs on the beach dead before. Plenty of empty and broken shells, remnants of a life lived, or a renovated shell house….Molluscs like to play the housing market too… But never whole dead creatures. And incredibly large specimens. The beach was full of sea urchins too. Piles and piles of them.

Even now, the ash and debris is still washing up 9 months later. Every big swell brings another dump. It feels like it will never stop, an endless fire tide.

What was that process of making these works like for you? 

Very Cathartic. After feeling so hopeless, distressed and grief stricken, making work was one of the few things I could do. It allowed me to tell a story and make a memorial for things lost.

As an artist whose practice is based significantly on connection to place and the natural world, the possibility of losing this environment is utterly disabling. It’s a terrifying thing to feel like you’re losing your sense of self and identity. We had a brief insight into how it feels to be a refugee.

You’ve written that your art making offers therapeutic aspects for you personally, and to speak to these times…

‘The tide serves as a perfect metaphor for the nature of living through the fire, it’s sudden conflagration followed by evacuation and destruction and then calm benign days. The wait for the next round of severe fire conditions worsening. Months and months of suspended time and trauma, lives on hold. As an artist whose practice is wholly focused on the environment, coming to terms with the loss of our forests, flora and fauna has been devastating. The only tonic for this despair? To keep working.’

Are there other insights that you would add from this vantage points of six, seven months on?

Nothing has changed. Everything is spiralling out of control. We are one more teetering jenga piece closer to tumbling.

Look at California! Fires blaze across the state, crazy lightning storms, so many ancient forests and wilderness lost. This is our new normal. Fires, Floods and Pandemic. Everything is extreme.

It’s easy to forget about climate change when things seem normal and benign. This is the chance we have to change things, to plan.

Take nothing for granted. The beauty is in all the tiny details. And the fragility is what makes it all the more beautiful and wondrous.


And now as Covid is this other the global presence dominating our lives, and we re-examine the role of nature in our health and wellbeing ?

We’re all a part of the same ecosystem. The balance is off kilter, trying to right itself.

Without clean water, trees, food how do we survive? With 80% of our local forest lost I know my body is feeling it. I suffer hayfever and sinus headaches that have increased dramatically with the loss of humidity and the lack of trees in the environment. Many other locals are complaining of lung damage and new asthma conditions from smoke inhalation. What kind of effect could this have on top of someone contracting covid? We need to look at everything holistically.

Observing nature teaches you this, everything is connected. EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED. I know I’m getting yelly, apologies! I wish more people listened.     

Your Burnt Offering series are monochromatic…

This seems important on a number of levels. It’s such a visual contrast to the lurid, saturated glow of flames telecast live and re-screened during the wall-to-wall reporting of the 2019-2020 mega fires across Australia.

Thoughts Julie?

I couldn’t see colour. Just blackened bush and burnt leaves. Mind you, some of the burnt leaves have beautiful burnished bronze on them. The graphic quality of the blackened washed up leaves on the tideline was so strong I wanted to keep it simple, something everyone would recognise.

The forms also mimic the maps we watched as the fire slowly spread, moving relentlessly down the coast towards us.

Reversing the positive and negative, carving the tideline as white on a black background transforms the debris into a constellation. Pinpricks of light and hope.

Black and White is also a reference to the political and cultural views surrounding climate change. You either believe or you don’t. Or don’t want to, It’s easier that way.

Your art practises & subject choices have become finely attuned to the  micro details of beautiful Eurobodalla shorelines, in most recent years – intertidal rock pools, marine life and nesting birds; the remnant bones and cycles of nature beneath your bare feet…

People tend to disregard the little things. They look for the big things, the awe-inspiring. I look for the little things. The patterns that are reflected through everything…. in and on our bodies, on broken shells and rocks, washed up seaweeds. They are constellations, tiny worlds to be explored and valued. I meditate on them.

A small rock pool on Broulee Island can keep me occupied for hours. I start to notice the tiniest things, macroscopic movements and life everywhere. The devil is in the details! Look at that tiny virus bringing us to our knees. Nothing is new, it’s all happened before. Just ask our ancestors.

I watch weather patterns, the sun set and rise. Take the time to listen to the birds, watch the changes in the seasons. I notice the temperature rising and the rainfall patterns changing, the fire threats and the disappearing species.

I listen to the sound of frogs after rain and witness the return of swans after the fires subsided. Autumnal migrations bringing hope. 

Your wish for Eurobodalla, Julie?

Dear fellow Eurobodallians, open your eyes! Listen. And smell the smoke coming, because it will come again if we do nothing. Value the environment you exist in, it will thank you a thousand times over.

In the words of Susanna Clarke from her latest book Piranesi, ‘The beauty of the house is immeasurable, it’s kindness infinite’.

Did I mention I was a Bookseller….? Can’t help myself! 

Thanks so much Julie for sharing your works and your processes and reflections with WOOEE’s readers!

Julie Mia Holmes was interviewed by Magella Blinksell for WOOEE