Anna Raupach

Sunshine Coast National Art Prize 2026 - Finalist

_{Image courtesy of artist.}

Anna Raupach
ACT

Slow violence (Palisades, LA)
2025
Embroidery thread on thermal blanket
118 x 100cm

Slow Violence (Palisades, Los Angeles) extends a series of works made by hand-stitching bushfire maps into emergency blankets, from Australia's Black Summer to Los Angeles’s urban wildfires. By stitching satellite imagery of burnt land into a surface that signals emergency, heat, and crisis, I reinterpret extreme weather events through a material process that collapses planetary-scale data into tactile, human-scale forms.

In these works, the slow technique of stitching is a repetitive and meditative practice that simultaneously destroys and repairs its grounding substrate. Primarily designed to retain heat but also a potential signal reflector, the thermal blanket references global warming and signifies the tipping point of fire from restorative to catastrophic. The term ‘slow violence’ refers to invisible implications of climate change that are temporally and spatially removed from sites of immediate destruction. I explore this idea through a tactile investigation of temporality and scale, where the accumulated time and labour of individual actions dissolve into satellite imagery at human scale.

The gold thermal shield reflects multiple social contexts that resonate with both Southern California and coastal Australia. This vivid material conveys car culture, satellite technology, and the spectacle of wealth. Behind this façade are the environmental affinities of hot, dry climates, fire-adated ecologies, road infrastructures, and high-value real estate occupying hazardous locations. While a reciprocal firefighting partnership has historically allowed Australia and the US to share resources, the Palisades fire of January 2025 shows our opposite fire seasons are now ominously overlapping.