Siemon Scamell-Katz | immersion paysagère

I would like to combine new non-figurative paintings with a soundscape and, potentially, an olfactory-scape, in order to further develop my work on the sensorial recording and representation of landscapes. I envision collaborating with other artists to realize this project.

I began with illness – not only as a private condition, but as a way of thinking: a body failing, systems misfiring, mistreatment ignored until warning signs become unavoidable. From there, almost inevitably, my attention shifted outward, toward climate collapse. I needed a metaphor that was neither abstract nor distant. Staying in Athens, I did not have to look far. Wildfire imposed itself as the most immediate and visible form of environmental breakdown.

I read academic literature on wildfire ecology and behavior, alongside accounts by practitioners (firefighters, land managers, researchers) particularly from North America and Australia, where wildfire has long been understood as both a natural process and a human catastrophe. I watched news footage and read testimonies compiled by journalists and professionals describing its causes, spread, and aftermath. Gradually, the focus narrowed. Greece entered the frame, and with it the 2018 wildfire in Mati.

Mati could not be approached only as an environmental event. The scale of human loss, the near-total destruction of the town, and the political response that followed made it a fracture point in contemporary Greek consciousness. It exposed failures not only of infrastructure and planning, but of responsibility, narrative, and collective memory. To understand this landscape more directly, I travelled to forested and peri-urban areas around Athens, places caught between regrowth and ruin. I photographed what I saw: charred trunks beside new shoots, houses pressed against combustible land, the uneasy calm that follows disaster. At the same time, I sought out artistic responses to the Mati wildfire – photographic work by Vassilis Vrettos and soundscapes by artists such as Stratos Bichakis – to understand how others had tried to give form to what resists representation.

My work has long been shaped by the idea of the sublime: its philosophical history, its role in painting, its capacity to overwhelm reason. During my research, I encountered the notion of “sublime annihilation”, articulated by Amaris Enid Montes in her study of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” and Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name. Both works describe a world transformed beyond recognition, not through spectacle alone, but through a slow erosion of the familiar – “the ruins of what has become of our collective home”. This concept clarified something I had been circling: the possibility of using the sublime not to elevate humanity, but to dissolve it.

Contemporary environmental discourse relies too heavily on realist representation – facts, images, statistics – that are easily dismissed, politically instrumentalized, or absorbed into a background noise of catastrophe. Worse, they often produce paralysis rather than action. Montes’ argument suggested another route. The sublime, precisely because it disrupts comprehension, is weird. It can interrupt anthropocentric certainty. In its of excess – its strangeness, its terror – it renders the viewer briefly “thoughtless”, and in doing so exposes the deeper thoughtlessness that has driven ecological destruction.

The painting process emerged from this tension. I began outdoors, sketching on site around Athens and on nearby islands, responding directly to landscape and light. Back in the studio, these sketches formed the basis for a second phase of work focused on color and material. I experimented with water-based oils, a technical shift that mirrored the conceptual one: slower, more uncertain, resistant to control. The work does not attempt to document wildfire or illness. Instead, it occupies the space where personal vulnerability and environmental collapse reflect one another – where the sublime is no longer redemptive but quietly annihilating. From this process emerged the series of nine paintings called “I’m Burnt”.