Aftermath: Landscape photography by John Gollings from Black Saturday

The Black Saturday bushfires burnt across Victoria on and around Saturday, 7 February 2009. These fires, as many as 400 individual fires, resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire when 173 people died and 414 were injured. The fires were mainly centred around Kinglake, Marysville, Narbethong, Strathewen and Flowerdale regions which were all but completely destroyed.

This exhibition features the work of John Gollings, a prominent Melbourne based photographer. His aerial photographs of the devastated blackened forests of the Kinglake Marysville region reveal the raw abstract patterns of the land. Stripped of vegetation there is a curious play of black and colour, of patterns and textures, that is only revealed in the destruction of the bush. His images capture and merge the ambiguous patterns of cast shadows and blackened tree trunks, while other images reveal the rolling topography of the denuded landscape, where roads and tracks and the marks of man add to the extensive geometry of the land.