Ensuring that his interventions in the natural environment are minimal, Murray Fredericks questions the concept of “landscape” and pushes past the limitations of documentary photography. “Landscape is a human construct,” he says. “It doesn’t exist until you put a frame around it, or make a garden, or designate it as being apart from everything else.”
Fredericks’s work looks at human emotional responses to the land we inhabit. For his latest photo-graphs, he specifically enquires into our reactions to fire. “We all have an evolutionary response to fire—a deep feeling of excitement or fear, or a strong memory. There are many layers to it.”
His intense imagery of trees in flames is situated amid Australia’s major inland ephemeral river systems. Under threat, and the highly publicised subject of gross mismanagement and exploitation, these systems, such as the now infamous Murray-Darling, add another layer of interest to Fredericks’s photos.
While he says these river environments are usually dry, they quickly spring back to life when there is rain, hosting a complex web of unique biodiversity. “They have been massively affected by water theft and corruption and you can see all the evils of colonisation encapsulated in the Murray-Darling in the dispossession of Indigenous people and of small farmers by corporations.”
To photograph the flaming trees, Fredericks used bendable gas lines sourced from a pyrotechnic specialist who works in the film industry. These “slinkys” are wired up the back of the trunks and branches of trees, then the gas is ignited and the mini-inferno is quickly photographed within 30 seconds before the flames are doused. “The trees that we select are dead, but they are important as habitat, so I want to leave them as we found them.
Blaze
Murray Fredericks
ARC ONE Gallery
28 November—3 February 2024
This article was originally published in the November/December 2023 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Suggested Reading
65,000 Years brings truth telling to art history
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
Jane O'Sullivan
Oslo Davis reimagines art terms
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
Oslo Davis
The major exhibitions open in each capital city this summer
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Art Guide Australia
Reviving the potter’s quarter
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
Michelle Wang
Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana and inherited influence
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Stranger than fiction: Magritte and Cao Fei
In two new exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, René Magritte and Cao Fei speak to each other across cultures and eras about the way that perception can unsettle reality—and the places the real intersects with the surreal.