As with De Freston, though, a bright side emerged. “I felt quite upset and annoyed and worried about what the hell I was going to do,” Fernie says. This led to a kind of alchemy, with De Freston turning the ash into new paintings and appreciating the pieces burnt beyond repair as “astonishing sculptural objects” that held a secret history beneath the mystical charcoal.A similar incident happened to art scholar Jes Fernie, who had arranged for Heather and Ivan Morison’s Ultrasauros sculpture to be moved to Colchester, but the night before the dinosaur’s journey, it burnt down. There was “a period of grief and mourning … but at the same time the very next day looking at the burnt out space and seeing possibility everywhere”. Something new, though, was forged in the flames. The fire “really, really, quickly escalated” and 12 years of work was destroyed in as many minutes. “For various reasons, I decided to kind of ritualistically burn a number of paintings … setting light in order to create,” he explains. Tom de Freston, putting the finishing touches to a collection of work with the Syrian writer Prof Ali Souleman, watched his own blowtorch incinerate the entirety of his studio. While most such fires, and the reactions, are out of the control of the artists, others become accidental arsonists. Pappas-Kelley suggests it sparked “schadenfreude towards the YBAs” in general. Some saw it as a cultural comeuppance.” Hirst’s was one of the first big names that the public latched on to. “After the Momart fire there was an almost gleeful response. The public’s reaction to that blaze was different from the sympathy shown in the wake of the Glasgow fires. He argues that all objects of art hold their own destruction latent within them. “An event like a Momart fire is good for revealing the way art metaphorically trips on the carpet,” says Dr Jared Pappas-Kelley, author of Solvent Form: Art and Destruction. Glasgow School of Art has gone up in flames twice in the last decade, while in 2004 the Momart warehouse fire in London destroyed British art worth about £30m, including, ironically, work by Hirst. ![]() Due to flammable materials and hazardous studios, the art world has experienced more than its fair share of infernos. ![]() Of course, most fires involving art are accidental. On the spot … Damien Hirst with some of his intact art.
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