These works are a cathartic response to the traumatic experience of the Bunyip Ridge Fires during Black Saturday (February 2009). While driving with my sister to my parents’ home on the edge of the state forest in Neerim East, we were confronted by an enormous plume of rolling embers and dark foreboding smoke.

In the aftermath of the fires, I found myself unable to work. The haunting images of the sky—cloaked in thick, burning smoke—stayed with me. Abandoning my usual practice of painting interior scenes in oils, I turned to watercolour, seeking the medium’s fluidity to capture the subtle yet powerful movement of smoke and glowing ash as they rolled across the landscape.