Air

Invisible Australian artist and photojournalist Rachel Mounsey captured the Black Summer bushfires that swept through her home, the remote coastal community of Mallacoota, on New Year’s Eve 2019. The fires raged across eastern Australia for months, burning millions of hectares of land and killing and displacing around three billion animals. Her images record the surreal otherworldliness of those days when the air was thick with particulate matter, soot and burnt leaves. The sky went black mid-morning, then everything took on a red, amber, even mustard glow. Holidaymakers and locals alike, beach towels wrapped over their mouths and noses, were evacuated by the Navy. In Mallacoota fires in the sky 3 (from ‘Mallacoota fires in the sky’ series) 2020, there is a sense that the end of the world may not be all that far away. Against the burnt dusty brown of water and sky, a group of children on Christmas holiday paddle the inlet — a plastic orange kayak signalling ‘emergency’ amid the uncanny stillness. A different kind of toxic haze appears in Thu Van Tran’s Rainbow Herbicides 2018, as she reconstructs the toxic drifts of defoliant sprayed over her country of birth, Vietnam, in finely detailed graphite drawings. These clouds broil uneasily in an amalgam of awe and horror, born of natural as well as man-made energies: the shapes of clouds meet the tall plumes of ash erupting from volcanos. Over this mass of airborne turmoil, six paint strokes are aerosol-sprayed in white, pink, green, blue, purple and orange: the colour codes for lethal herbicides, including Agent Orange, sprayed by United States forces over the people of Vietnam from 1962 to 1971, during the VietnamWar, to defoliate forest areas and destroy crops. Rachel Mounsey / Mallacoota fires in the sky 3 (from ‘Mallacoota fires in the sky’ series) (detail) 2020 37 36 Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all breathe the same air?