In the hushed, darkened room at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, a slender plinth sets the stage for the ceremonial sensory experience that is Katie Paterson’s immersive installation. To Burn, Forest, Fire enacts an incense ritual, held daily at 3:30 to commemorate each day’s newly ignited forest fires. Performative and engaging, the installation provides a potent real-time metaphor for the destruction climate change is causing to our planet.
The atmosphere Paterson has created is sensory: gentle chimes and heady, bespoke incense demand our awareness of our surroundings. A rich, velvety emanation takes us back to the earth’s first forest, 385 million years ago in Cairo, New York State, with its abundance and promise of new life. A second fragrance, sweeter and much more tentative, characterises the acutely endangered Amazon Rainforest – currently menaced by climate change and deforestation. Through scent Paterson evokes a vivid history of forest life on earth which, in the richly smoky, softly illuminated room, seems spiritual and divine.
In a stomach-lurching twist Paterson laces this tranquil sensory experience with a message of acute urgency. The exhibition portrays the scale of the emergency in no uncertain terms. An accumulating record of daily forest fires on the wall reminds us that the burning of the incense is merely a minute rendition of countless fires raging across the planet. A grim death knell signifying the end of the performance makes it clear: our current treatment of our planet will prove to be decisive.
To Burn, Forest, Fire reenacts in miniature the disaster that it memorialises. Paterson’s ritual provides a commemorative space for the loss of our natural world, threatened by a vivid foreshadowing of impending disaster. If there is one thing that emerges from the thirty minutes of the exhibition it is the urgency of taking time now to address the raging issues that threaten our planet.
“Talbot Rice Gallery” by Patrick_Down is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.