From the ashes: art, activism and Fiona Lee’s “Carbon Tax”
At the end of the small rectangular room, the eye is immediately drawn to two screens sitting on rusted saw horses alongside each other. On one, video footage of a green, still, scene with no clear subject. As you watch it, a small quail forages on a bare patch of concrete — the foundation of an absent building. Birdsong fills the room around you. Alongside it is another screen, showing footage of the same place fifteen months ago, but here and then it is night, the camera is careening wildly and in the darkness you can see a house in flames. There are headphones, and you put them on. The sound of birds vanishes and instead it is the windy shout of fire you can hear and a man’s voice, tight-throated, swearing.
This is the title work by Newcastle artist Fiona Lee in her exhibition Carbon Tax, created out of the melted metal, ruined objects and ashes of her home near Bobin, in the Manning Valley, which was destroyed by the Rumba Dump fire in November 2019.
I can’t keep those headphones on for very long at all. It’s as if they are hot themselves, in your ears, in your mind. The intensity of grief and impotence, of ordinary people taxed for and by a system that is eating up and burning down the world around us, is overwhelming. I’m not the only person I see weeping when witnessing these works, recoiling from the emotion of it.
Fiona created Carbon Tax with the support of a residency at Newcastle’s Creator Incubator, a creative community space of 35 artists and makers, tucked away in a warehouse in Hamilton North, Newcastle. I talked to her about her process, about art and activism the morning before the exhibition opened.
In front of “Carbon Tax,” we talk about change that keeps coming in the aftermath of cataclysm. There’s a distinct before and after, Fi tells me, but the still and unmoving scene of after disguises continual upheaval and change. Weeds colonise the spaces left by lost homes. The empty space where her home was is now vibrant and green with them. People exclaim with joy at this growth and colour, but she sees disturbance and degradation, an alienated and estranged landscape, in the weeds’ dominance. She talks about the long process of returning, and cleaning and removing materials, of not wanting to visit the site and then eventually becoming ready to do so. “Carbon Tax” both disguises and displays this ongoing process of alteration in place and in ourselves, a contradiction that becomes hinged as we talk on the word “stay” which appears superimposed over the weedy green scene. “Staying” is imperative and impossible. It is something the fire authorities tell you must make a decision about before an emergency, because staying must be planned. It then becomes the question everyone asks of you after your house burns down: will you stay? Where will you stay? Like tax, it is a word with layers. As a verb, it could mean to remain, to temporarily visit, to assuage or curb. And it’s an object too: a support, a reprieve, a brace, a power to endure. Stay and defend.
It was Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormick who was “the catalyst for everything,” Fiona tells me. And by everything she means, I think, her emergence out of shock and grief and back into action and art just a few days after the cataclysm. Rumba Dump razed Bobin on 9 November. On 11 November, while the fire crisis gripped the north east of New South Wales McCormick told ABC radio that rural people don’t want to talk about the climate change that fuelled the fires, that they “don’t need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time, when they’re trying to save their homes…” The next day, Fiona and her partner Aaron and daughter Pepper joined hundreds of others on Macquarie Street, out the front of New South Wale parliament, with a bucket of ashes from their house, to protest moves by the NSW government to wind back consideration of climate change in planning decisions about new coal mines.
In the first work she created during the residency, Fi painted McCormick’s words — “woke” “give me a latte” — onto chainsaw bars they used to build their home, retrieved from the rubble after the fire. She says now that this particular work brings her great joy. McCormick’s words stand out in contrast to the few words that Fi herself has used: along with “Stay” on the video screen, “NOW” appears on the wall opposite crafted from melted pieces of Fi and Aaron’s car. “Run” also appears.
I eagerly agreed when Fi asked me to come and write something about the exhibition, but I have ambivalent feelings about crafting fine prose about the consequences of climate change. Aestheticising the degradation and disaster of climate change is a gesture of absorption or accommodation from which I recoil. Taking climate change into the fabric of our lives and our culture feels like a betrayal of the activist insistence that this crisis we’re creating is aberrant and must be stopped and refused. Don’t make this normal, don’t make it decorative, my instincts say. And yet, the concrete, metal, words of images of Fi’s work feel like resistance. Maybe that’s because form doesn’t dominate: she lets the materials speak directly about where they came from and where we’re going. “I’ve tried to keep things pretty raw” she tells me, and the rawest of these works is “Dystopian Shower,” an installation built from cast items that survived the fire and other recovered objects — twisted and torn, but recognisable. Embedded within these concrete casts are the ashes of her home and fly-ash — a byproduct of burning coal. (Fi has spoken previously about how she feels about using concrete in her work.) These are mounted against a grainy life-sized image of her bathroom after the fire (weeds encroaching) and presented on gleaming white tiles. I’m surprised that this work too, moves me to tears. She tells me, “I’ve been thinking about materials, construction, what materials speak to, what experience they tell, in their raw form.” And they do tell: the bleak greyness, the air of abandonment, the grotesque facticity of the dystopia, is paradoxically both the future we’re making, and the distorted ideas of shelter that Fi accepts she has now lost. “I’ve created a different world: I’ve created the same world,” she tells me.
At the opening of the exhibition, there’s a large crowd, not just Newcastle people but bushfire survivors from the mid-north and south coasts of New South Wales. Fi has set up a long wall of butchers paper, with pencils, black permanent markers and charcoal from her house (she wanted people to take the remnants in their hands and make communion with the destruction) available there for people to write on it and express how the show makes them feel. Fi and Aaron are part of a network of bushfire survivors speaking out about climate change. Fi’s show, and the role of art in a time of climate change, is as necessary as activism and complementary to it. It sounds as if she only herself fully comprehended once the works emerged the nature of the immersive experience she was trying to create. These works are not slogans but experiences and their main purpose is not action but understanding: “I hope people grasp it more fully by experiencing this show.” The “it” that we grasp is our exposure and the end of our civilised illusions of security and shelter.
“When I first came here,” she tells me, “I brought big piles of rubble and laid them all out on the ground and I categorised them into what they were: this is car, this is house — as in shelter, poles and tools required to build it and separately, the domestic home, a more intimate pile of clothes, spoons, sentimental relics, and then there was food — garden bed materials, water, hoses pipes: each of the elements that I considered we needed to survive — we made the place with this at the forefront of our minds.” She and Aaron imagined their home as a place of safety, a place they and Pepper could retreat to in the coming environmental, political and social dissolution. As she drove to the city to escape the fire, she realised that her sense of safety and security had flipped. She was now seeking it in the concrete jungle, the very locus of industrial society that is both creating disaster and providing Fi and her family with refuge from it. Many others have sought safety, retreat and shelter in the bush in places like Bobin, Whytaliba and Nymboida but the merciless reality of climate change has thrust itself onto those alternative communities and thrust their grieving members into climate change activism.
To practice both art and activism, feels balanced and sustainable to Fi. One without the other lacks something. She was apprehensive about the emotion that might overwhelm her on the opening night, but what I saw there was solidarity and celebration. The arts community were quick to give during the height of the 2019–20 bushfire crisis: selling works and creating performances to raise money for people affected by the disaster. The Creator Incubator provided Fi with the time and space she needed to create these works, and Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action are providing her with a network of friends that have been through the fear and loss and emerged like kiln-fired tiles themselves: strong, expressive and interlocked.
In the years to come, more people will be drawn into the tragedy of climate change. It is inevitable and necessary that artists will incorporate this horror into cultural expression. Activism and art, after all, serve different purposes. Coming to terms with the damage and degradation that climate change will increasing inflict on our lives, our communities and the places we call home is what artists will do, and that is as essential as carrying on the struggle to prevent and mitigate that damage. We will simply have to do both.
