My Black Summer
by visual artist, Lee Honey
Sometimes, not very often, and only for the briefest of moments, I feel I am inside nature. I am part of a living, pulsing, growing something that is far larger and far more complicated than anything I can imagine.
Most of the time though I inhabit the built world. I walk on foot paths that are well defined and clear of tripping hazards, drive roads that are smooth and made safe by traffic laws, live in a house that protects me from fierce storms, rely on science to develop drought-tolerant crops, cures for illnesses, etc, you get the idea. I am lucky. I have been insulated from the harsher turns nature can take. When the Black Summer fires burnt a good deal of eastern Australia, however, things changed. All our cultural goods, the insulation, was gone and I, like everyone in the fire’s path, had to confront the power and terror of a turbo-charged nature.
Nature is important in my work. Through art-making I want to understand how I and others relate to her and how that relating influences how we act towards her. My early collages focused on containment and control. Over time I developed a visual language where I represented the nature/culture, unbuilt/built dichotomy as conversations between antique furniture and landscapes. It was an attempt to play with how we perceive/experience nature through the lenses/frames of culture.
Before the fires, as the drought deepened and the trees around me started sacrificing their limbs, I started to take a more overt political stance. The Elephant in the Cabinet Room is Climate Change is an example of this. The work was part of The Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre 2019 Literary Salon and was a response to Rosemary Platyus’s poem The Elephant in the Room. The drive to make this work was my growing alarm about the fate of the Mogo State Forest, which surrounds our place on three sides, and my sense of outrage and frustration at the LNP’s decades long stone-walling on any significant action on climate change.
The next development in my art practice was Aftermath. This work was part of the River of Art festival and shown at Sydney St Gallery in Mogo in 2020. It was a departure from my paper-based, found images collages. It started as a need, no compulsion, to make work in order to cope with grief. When we returned to our place, after the fire, we found the incinerated sculls of kangaroos. They crumbled under our fingers when we attempted to touch them. I wanted to mark these deaths and the deaths of so many other species. The work used ash collected from around Mogo and North Durras which was stencilled directly onto the gallery floor.
I learnt a lot making and exhibiting Aftermath. Purusha, who owns Sydney St Gallery, also felt compelled to make work after the fire. His raw, psychologically complex charcoal drawings of people and their survival stories lined the gallery walls while my work sat on the floor in the centre of the room. When people entered the exhibition space we pointed out there was work on the walls and on the floor. Most were mindful but a few people each day forgot and ended up walking all over my work. It was frustrating because I had to make tricky repairs, but also interesting. Maybe for some people, the human story was so compelling they forgot there were other stories at their feet, just as devastating, of plant and animal losses.
My most recent work returns to paper-based found images and my beloved birds. My experience with Aftermath has prompted me to start thinking about attention. Where are we looking? What is at our feet? Our eye line? Above us? Or at our periphery? An example of this work is a series of artist books provisionally titled What is Lost to Us When We Don’t Notice Things Disappearing?
The Black Summer Fires were immense, not just in terms of how many hectares were burnt but also in how many lives were lost – human and non human. I don’t want to diminish the importance of the human toll but the toll on nature was, for me, devastating. With the discovery of the kangaroo skulls and other animal remains I felt tangibly connected to those billions of losses. It has had a profound affect on me and my art practice. I think it will reverberate throughout my work for as long as I keep making it.
Lee Honey
Visual artist
Mogo
December 2021
WOOEE 2022
