Blaze

• Scott Robinson

It seems we have made an enemy … of the elements
— Kate Rigby, “Imagining Catastrophe”

In Blaze, Murray Fredericks confronts us with a series of burning trees. Set against rich, graded hues of blue and black, the flaming branches are all centred in the frame. The photographs are composed with the even horizon visible from a standing-eye perspective, with a sharp contrast made between the drama of the conflagration in the foreground and the placid, crystalline colours in the background.

So primed, the images evoke a fiery theophany. The appearance of god(s) in the form of an element—fire—presents a contradictory ephemerality and scarring, a destructive force reflecting the uncertain nature of the deity. And yet, unlike Fredericks’s previous landscape series, including Array (2018–19) and Vanity (2017) (on show at the Museum of Australian Photography), the horizon features more prominently, a solid black line or sharp edge separating earth or water and sky. The landscape is given detail and texture that is absent from the more abstract examinations of light in the previous series. Fredericks seems to be making a firmer, more grounded statement of intention.

It is hard to separate this intention from the devastating bushfires and environmental disasters, including the 2019 Menindee fish kill, that have occurred since Array and Vanity. Artists have responded to the ecological condition, and ‘Blaze’ makes space to reflect on the ongoing crisis. Conditions in the Murray Darling Basin river system, for example, remain precarious, with deteriorating river health and declining dissolved oxygen levels threatening a new wave of mass fish death.

Wedged between fire and drought, Fredericks’s images conduct a double-study of the elements, toying with the idea of a “controlled burn” by using “non-destructive methods” to illuminate the form of the trees without damaging them. This idea of a “controlled burn” has tantalised settler imaginations since colonisation; taming the elemental forces at play in the Australian continent remains a hubristic fantasy of which interventions in the Murray Darling Basin are a perfect encapsulation. Environmental historian, Tom Griffiths writes that fire is “integral to our ecology, culture and identity; it is scripted into the deep biological and human history of the fire continent.”

Fredericks’s joins photographers like Katrin Koenning in reckoning with this continental condition. Her series, Lake Mountain (2011-) explores the effects of fire on Taungurung Country in Victoria, work she describes explicitly as “pleading to change our violent ways.” Similarly, David Stephenson’s 2001–02 Drowned series and more recent 2021 series focusing on ghostly trees and the consequences of environmental intervention suggest that settler photographers are reckoning with the consequences of colonisation on the Australian landscape in shared ways. Stephenson’s muted grey palate, however, is countered by Fredericks’s luminous skies, reflected in the water on rivers and lakes.

Unlike earlier attempts to capture the intensity of nature, such as John Longstaff’s Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 (1898), Fredericks as well Stephenson and Koenning present landscapes largely stripped of human presence, quiet in their presentation of the aftermath rather than the heightened drama of the inferno. Another precedent recalled by Fredericks’s sculptural use of tree branches is Sidney Nolan’s photographic series taken during the 1952 drought (never published by The Courier-Mail, who had commissioned them, for being “too graphic”). In some of these haunting images, Nolan drapes horse carcasses over tree branches, in an effect recalling Goya’s The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra, 1810–20) series, in which the limbs of dismembered soldiers were strung and impaled shockingly on trees during the Peninsular War.

Environmental disaster summons an apocalyptic imaginary, to which artists like Koenning respond with a plea, or a warning. After the Black Thursday fires of 1861 (depicted by English artist William Strutt in Black Thursday, 1864), Frances Perry, wife of the Bishop of Melbourne reported that people were “panic-struck.” She continued, “they thought, and well they might, that the world was coming to an end.” While Fredericks himself demurs from the implication of a direct ecological statement, describing his proposition in Blaze “not as a protest, but as a beacon,” in responding to Fredericks’s work in 2017, Dylan Rainforth described the burning bush as a “biblical vision.” This is an unavoidable association, albeit with necessarily transformed connotations in the settler colonial context of Australia.

But the “burning bush” as theophany or even incarnation of God in the Book of Exodus is far stranger than, I think, people account for in throwing out the allusion. The Bible is a palimpsest of iconographic examples, yet the burning bush has proven both unpopular and awkward to depict. Artists move between focusing on Moses, sometimes in an almost heroic fashion (as in Domenico Feti’s 1613–14 Moses before the Burning Bush or William Blake’s muscular watercolour Moses and the Burning Bush, ca. 1800–03), and narrativising the encounter with God through the landscape (as in Dierick Bouts the Elder’s fifteenth-century work, or Domenichino’s seventeenth-century attempt. John Martin’s 1833 print depicts the scene as effectively overwhelmed by a foreboding mountain landscape).

This loose tradition of largely unsuccessful depictions share the mystical character of the appearance of God in a bush, which, as Exodus 3:2 has it, “burned without fire.” Moses, in exile in Egypt, pauses while leading his father-in-law’s flock and “the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.” Moses turns to find the source of the fire, but God speaks to him “out the midst of the bush,” demanding that Moses “put thy shoes from off they feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” God announces himself as God to Moses whereupon “Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.” The idea of speaking fire is awe-inspiring in a way that has proven allergic to representation.

Moses’s turn away from the sight reflects a traditional caution about gazing upon God, or even representing God. Later in Exodus, in his increasingly prophetic role leading the Jewish people out of Egypt, Moses demands, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory,” only for God to reply, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” Instead, God leads Moses to “a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand, and thou shall see my back part: but my face shall not be seen.”(33:18–23)

Is the flame we are presented with in Frederick’s images the “back part”? The passages from Exodus suggest a double warning: against the hubris of control and the gaze; and, in the biblical narrative, of the ten plagues God promises to acquit Moses with in order to demonstrate to the Pharaoh his prophetic function. In the first of these plagues, all the waters of Egypt “shall become blood upon dry land” (7:24). Not only does Exodus suggest ecological precedent, the nature of God’s appearance also connects to the photographic process, with God’s “glory passeth by” occurring “in a clift,” as though passing like light through a shutter. What for Moses was only a flash, for us becomes a permanent inscription in digital pigment, printed on cotton rag.

I pass through this important tradition not to proselytise but because the images in Blaze suggest an other-worldly emanation, echoing the violation of an ecological boundary by bringing into one watery world what belongs in another, namely fire. The landscapes behind the flame are desolate and writers on Fredericks often describe the images as “empty.” For example, Angela Connor describes them as “studies on the void that lead the viewer into the abyss,” while Pippa Milne’s catalogue essay for ARC ONE refers to “untold emptiness” and “incalculable spaces.” John MacDonald, writing in 2006 of Fredericks, states that “they are literally pictures of nothing.”

These descriptions make the photographs seem like windows into a void, another world emptied of feature, an invitation to pure colour. In an accompanying film directed by Bentley Dean and edited by Tania M. Nehme, also titled “Blaze,” which premiered in November as part of the Head On festival, Fredericks explores this idea further. He discusses how the landscapes “wouldn’t exist as pictures in their own right, but light a fire in the middle of it” and the landscape takes shape. The fire on which each composition focuses, paradoxically frames the landscape, manufacturing a moment when, as Fredericks explains, “the landscape lets you in.” It is more difficult with the Blaze series, than in say Array or Vanity, to describe the landscapes as empty. But even so, this ascription is strange.

Other-worldliness captures the extent to which the images do not invite the viewer into a recessive space. They are both flat planes of colour, and forbidding landscapes that do not offer a foothold. Yet they also testify to histories, and the term “empty” (as opposed to say, “emptied”) tends to erase the history that created these landscapes, and which Fredericks’s images may frame. Weather, water, fire, air: these elements, as we all now know, have histories that humans have altered, making the supposed “emptiness” of the photographs witness to the historical moment pulling them through each other.

Blaze #25, Muloorina (2023) suggests an atomic explosion, like those at Maralinga in South Australia, which were justified on the basis of its “remoteness,” as if no one lived there, a violent colonial imposition of emptiness with enduring repercussions. The photographs in Blaze evoke a world hostile to human or living presence. In a 2007 catalogue essay, Robert McFarlane describes Fredericks’s work as depicting “the crust of another planet … a desiccated landscape seemingly devoid of vitality … Little scent of life emanates from within the vastness before Fredericks’ lens.”

Yet, unlike images in Array and Vanity, the Blaze series is more grounded and provides an opening for the texture of the landscape, like the sinewy creases of salt plains, the dancing gesture of the tree branches in Blaze #17, Lake Pamamaroo, Menindee (2022). The effect achieved by mirror displacements in Array and Vanity—of giving the landscape form—is in Blaze achieved with the flame. This flame takes on a sculptural, substantial quality, as though made of glass or metal.

The flames in Blaze are less evocations of a natural phenomenon than de-naturalisations that enable the viewer to see the landscape, giving the expansive blue substance as a colour in Blaze #23, Muloorina, or the night sky in Blaze #24, Muloorina (2023) the appearance of vastness. The flame pays tribute to the natural structure of the trees in the Menindee and Darling anabranch images in the series, not by mimicking it but by consuming it, wrapping it to set it forth. McFarlane compares Fredericks to Lloyd Rees or Turner insofar as those artists “reduced the landscape to its elemental nature,” but here the “reduction” accomplishes an expansiveness, “something far greater,” he concludes.

Fredericks works at the limit of landscape in its traditional sense, objecting in the film to the way it fences off and creates borders in the world. By excluding identifiable geographic markers from the picture, Fredericks omits the specificity of the locations depicted, as McFarlane notes. This puts him in contact with a wider range of landscape photographers, including Richard Misrach and Joel Meyerowitz. The latter’s Bay/Sky series (1993) contained a foreword by Norman Mailer extolling the “ongoing quest for the instant when nature can reveal itself through mood, light, mist, wind or the endless vortices of water in its dialogue with sand.” Misrach, on the other hand, embraced a more politically and historically charged landscape, investigating borderlands in series like Desert Cantos (1979–), as well as executing colour studies on a grand scale with On the Beach (2002–).

In the cloudless skies of many images in the series, Fredericks heightens the intensity of colour to an almost disturbing degree. Even where clouds spread across the picture, the clarity and sharpness exceed the possibilities of real vision. It is as if the air has been sucked out of the world, as in the aftermath of some great catastrophe. Koenning’s Lake Mountain series, on the other hand, insists on the texture of the air to an almost suffocating degree, filling the frame with smoke, fog, or snow and disturbing the serenity of the scene with the foreboding claustrophobia of dense, inescapable air. Like Koenning, Fredericks links the motivation for the series to ecological concerns, as well as to water politics. Indigenous dispossession and corruption, but the images are too abstract to bear politics directly into the gallery space at ARC ONE.

Similarly, the accompanying film demonstrates the labour Fredericks and his assistant, Nick Bannehr, undertook to set up gas lines in the middle of rivers and lakes, and to drag gas bottles and camera equipment hundreds of metres into muddy dry lake beds. At first frustrated by the erasure of these signs of human intervention, I began to see the images as dispensing with the need to flaunt the artist’s ingenuity. The absence of smoke from the fires in the series abstracts from the signalling function fire plays, further removing it from the sign of human creation. Instead, as John Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters, the landscape has “lifted our thoughts to the throne of the Deity (rather than) encumbered them with the inventions of his creatures.” Looking at one of the images in Blaze, one does not wonder how the effect was achieved, but accepts a small portion of the miracle of the burning bush.