Katherine Boland, Tick Tock (ART 2022)

Since living through the 2019/20 bushfires which decimated my region on the Far South Coast of New South Wales, I have been compelled to make art with fire itself to raise awareness about global warming. Launched in 1947, the symbolic Doomsday Clock was created by scientists as an indicator of the world’s susceptibility to apocalypse. The closer the time is set to midnight, the closer the world is considered to be to catastrophe. Seventy years ago, the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight. Today, it is set at 100 seconds to midnight. Images of paint-splattered timber panels, burnt with a blow torch in my studio, have been manipulated with photo-editing software to create abstracted Doomsday Clocks, warning that we are running out of time to stop the catastrophic impact of human-induced climate change. Suspended in space, these burnt and blistered disks depict a scorched Earth where life no longer exists.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.