Diptych in acrylic and mixed media on 1.5″ deep canvas. 60*60cm
2023
This diptych was created during March 2023 which is known as smoky season in Chiang Mai. The ecosystem here is Koppen class AW, or tropical savanna climate. This means rain falls regularly during one period of the year, May – October, and outside this period there is very little rainfall.
This type of forest naturally loses its leaves when there is no rain, and this contributes tinder to burn in forest fires. Whilst seasonal fires are natural, they are also made worse by accidental and non accidental fire starting. In 2023 we lost over 8 hectares of forest in fires, and the fires came to the edge of my village. This is the closest they have come, even though we live on the edge of the national park. For more information and historical data on forest fires, visit www.globalforestwatch.org.
Our village is in a rain shadow, meaning the topography of the land is such that very little rain falls on our side of the hills behind the village. This makes it a micro-climate which is even drier than usual. I can often hear the rain as it falls, about 60m away from my house, and there is a distinct line in the village which marks where the rain shadow ends.
This diptych started out, as many of my works do, in the middle of the night when I could not sleep. I had driven home on the mountain pass from Samoeng, and all along the road the fire line was visible, just 15 m away. in places villagers had created fire breaks and were monitoring to make sure the fire didn’t jump. In other places they were throwing buckets of water to keep the ground around houses wet so it could not catch even if it did jump. The colour palette is quite unusual for me, focusing on cadmium red hue and Indian orange. These mark the fierceness of the fire I saw that night, and how it removes everything in its path.