Fiona Henderson

Fragile and Traumatised is a body of work that has its genesis in the catastrophic bushfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020.  Once the fires were extinguished I travelled around the affected areas collecting objects from houses, studios and sheds that had been burnt in the fires.  The objects I collected had been ordinary domestic items but were now transfigured by the fires.  Ashy, distorted and often broken they possessed an eloquent beauty that spoke of their ordeal in the fires.  The objects carry stories of trauma and loss that connect them to the people who owned them, to the country in which they were located and to the wider climate crisis affecting us all.