Waking up on the 1st of January 2020 and seeing the eery peachy glowing sky and smoke from the Australian bushfires which had drifted across the ocean – I immediately thought “Welcome to our future”. To me it was a dystopian future, an in your face reminder that climate change affects us all.

In dealing with this as an ongoing photographic project I want to convey a warning but I also want to convey the extraordinary beauty of our land and what we risk losing. In a sense the project has become prophetic – as more and more places shut down in the face of COVID 19 our land and planet has at times become devoid of people circulating in society. People have just disappeared suddenly, roads are empty, the land is abandoned and what life remains, is left struggling. There is an overwhelming sense of absence, of chaos and of abstraction.

This series of photographic images are given a historic processes wet plate collodion orange smoky tint – a reference to the bushfires and also to our photographic past which we also take for granted at our peril.