CJ Taylor was pushing back a fire front when a wind change almost killed him. A new exhibition aims to recreate a flashover – and disturb the public into action
The roar of an advancing bushfire, for those who have heard it, is often described as being as loud as an aircraft or an approaching freight train. “But my recollection was the opposite,” says volunteer firefighter and visual artist CJ Taylor, of the moment a fire burned over him. “Everything went quiet.”
It was November 2019, and Taylor and a group of fellow South Australian Country Fire Service volunteers had been deployed to north-eastern New South Wales, near the Guy Fawkes River national park. They were trying to push back a fire front but a sudden wind change meant it was gaining ground too quickly.
The group had to bunker down in their truck with fire blankets and wait for the front to burn over them, hoping it would pass before the sprinklers that sprayed a halo of water around the truck ran dry. “All I could hear was my breathing,” Taylor recalls, “and the person next to me doing the same thing.”
Taylor’s experience of that event, known as a flashover, was the spark for an immersive multimedia exhibition by the same name, opening at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne on Tuesday.
The first thing visible upon entry is a smouldering ember, floating in total darkness. “They’re a bit like snowflakes,” says the exhibition co-director Dr Robert Walton, of the University of Melbourne’s faculty of fine arts and music. “Every one of them is completely unique.” But its mesmerising quality belies its danger: embers can travel up to 20km ahead of a fire front, and during bushfires they are the main cause of house fires.
Around the corner, viewers are bathed in an ominous light, the hue approximating the sky as a fire gets closer and more intense. On two screens are portraits of four firefighters, who stand in front of virtual backdrops that have been created from their memories of fire. The work is titled 4 of 64,500 Volunteers, referring to the army of volunteers who sprung into action during the 2019-20 black summer bushfire season.
Many of the works in the exhibition have been created from photographs, which are rendered as three-dimensional objects – either comprising “point clouds” of tiny dots or hyperreal images.
The exhibition’s titular work, a 12-minute film loop playing on a monumental screen, has been created from about 30,000 photographs and 130m separate points, says exhibition co-director and the lead animator, Dr Phillip Wilkinson, of the VCA.
This arresting centrepiece gives the viewer the perspective of a fire front as it razes through pristine forest and encounters firefighters in action. The colours intensify and the sound builds with the crackle of fire and the static of radios. Blinding light at the point of flashover gives way to an ash world, the ghostly outline of trees appearing in white. Every object was photographed in real life and “composited together in 3D space to make one continuous landscape”, Wilkinson says.
The science is incontrovertible: human-caused global heating is increasing the intensity and severity of fire weather – days that are hot, dry and windy. Extreme fires can “basically create their own weather”, says Dr Kimberley Reid, a research fellow in high impact weather climate change at the University of Melbourne.
“You get to a point where you’ve got these huge storm clouds of ash and dust, and firebombing helicopters can’t fly over them. That’s when you’re likely to get these flashover events. That’s one of the scary consequences of more intense fires.”
The exhibition’s only direct depiction of fire is a nine-metre high vortex swirling alone on a screen. Three such whirling towers appeared when Taylor stepped out of the fire truck on to blackened earth once the flashover had passed.
Fire is a “force of nature that we find fascinating but repulsive at the same time”, Walton says. “We were thinking about how to work with beauty and awe in order to bypass some of the things … that we find hard to deal with [about the climate emergency].”
Taylor sees the exhibition as a form of activism, saying it can “offer a sense that data cannot” by representing an experience that cannot be photographed. “If [people] walk out feeling disquieted, disturbed and take one sense of that with them, then the work’s a success – because we need to act,” he says.
“People often feel like their individual action … doesn’t mean very much. It’s true we need drastic macro action from governments being able to stop burning carbon.
“As a volunteer I’m just a hose holder, unlike our previous prime minister.”
To those who ask, “What can I do?”, Taylor has an unequivocal response: “You do whatever you can where you stand. But to do nothing – well, we know where that leads. It’s about time and we’re running out.”
Flashover runs from 4-14 February at the Victorian College of Arts, Melbourne