The last ten years of witnessing increasingly devastating fires in Southern California left an indelible mark on the way I understand and experience its landscape. In 2016 I had my first experience. I began photographing and collecting ash left over from the fires. Combining this ash with white oil paint on wood panels that I burned and charred with torches, I began to paint the pyrocumulous ash clouds the fires produced. Applied in thin layers, systematically, over long periods of time, the images seem to emerge out of the ashy abyss.

‘Nostalgie’ began as a series in which I wanted to explore the similarities between human technology and the forces of nature, in other words, to put an atomic explosion on a similar footing with an exploding volcano, not so much for their magnitude, but for the awe they inspire, which often borders on a religious or mystical reverence. Other series followed, personal ones, based on old family photos, or more esoteric subjects. Painting these images in ash became an investigation into belonging, memory, grief, and exile. What connects these images is the sense of the uncanny, high drama and the sublime. But the ash cloud is a theme I return to time and again.

The devastating Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires opened a rift in the Southern California psyche. They were apocalyptic in their reach and eschatological in their dimension. Arriving at the precipice of not just a natural, but a cultural shift occurring in the country. Today, it is difficult to see these fires and natural disasters stripped of their political dimensions. Symbolically the fires represent the return of the repressed in the physical manifestation of the violent natural forces latent within the psychological topography of the land, but politically they are a manifestation of human hubris, an ongoing and failing attempt at subjugating nature to its will. This is nature in the era of extremely online politics.