NSW Far South Coast painter from Tura Beach uses ash and charcoal in artworks to resolve bushfire trauma

She lives in Tura Beach and since the Tathra bushfires in 2018, she has not been able to paint anything but scenes of skeletal charcoal covered trees, and red and orange hues over the horizon.

Ms Lindhorst uses her unique form of contemporary realism to try and work through her own emotions and grief surrounding so much loss of the bush during the fires.

She does have a sense of acceptance around the events which unfolded on the NSW Far South Coast over the last three years though, by identifying them as an integral and cyclical part of nature.

"Nothing under the sun is bad. It just is. So it depends which way you look at it so we can look at it. We can cry or we can look at it and rejoice in the beauty of it and know that there's a power there that will bring it back," she said.

She uses her abilities as a painter to express herself and resolve her feelings of loss. Although the fires did not reach her own home at Tura Beach, many of her friends lost properties during the fires and she still feels the grief of her fellow community members and those who lost so much during the Tathra and Black Summer bushfires.

She also said she has a real, "ongoing love affair with the landscape," and so walking through the burnt landscape was, "devastating, I just felt my heart breaking."

"I did a lot of walking through there and I did a lot of crying and there was just nothing.

"There wasn't a bird, there wasn't a sound, it was just desolate and so I took a lot of photos and just sat out there for a long time just feeling that land that was once so lush and green, and thriving, and teaming with birds and animals, and I just felt the tragedy of it."

Ms Lindhorst said she realised she had to paint the scenes she saw in order to come to terms with the bush that, "was torn apart."

"Painting for me is a very healing thing, it's cathartic," she said. "It's about facing the trauma of it all and transmuting all the sadness into more of a gratitude for what we do have, not what we don't have anymore."

Despite the devastation and mess that she witnesses, she also saw the beauty and so used that to ignite a series of work on the fires.

She has used burnt parts of the bush found during her walks such as charcoal, or leaves and branches to paint with, or crushed leaves in her paints for added texture.

"Putting that DNA into the painting just gives me that connection to the earth."

At other moments she also took her canvasses or paper directly to the sites which had burnt down and rubbed their surfaces onto the blackened trees. She would then return to her studio and create shapes using ink that would more clearly represent those trees she saw.

At other times she would make sketches while in the bushland and would return home to try and recreate them in her paintings.

More recently, Ms Lindhorst has been able to document changes in the bush, with the greenery of the forest floor appearing in some of her more recent work.

"Over a time the regeneration started, the birds started coming back and that again gave my paintings a little glimpse of the power of nature and how it has that ability to restore and regenerate."

One of the key moments for her seeing the slow regeneration of the forest was when the Bracken ferns returned to the forest floor. "When that comes back you know that the forest is regenerating," she said.

The Black Summer bushfires came along at the end of 2019 at a time when she, "felt like I was doing well," but like many in the region she was re-traumatised in a way.

One memory that was etched in her mind was when she saw wildlife emerging from the forest and diving into the lake. "It was just so disturbing," she said, "kangaroos on fire and diving into the water."

She said that her new series features scenes from the more recent fires but is just, "an extension of the old series."

She hasn't always had the strength to continue painting though and has taken long breaks without picking up a paintbrush.

In these moments she found retrieve in reconnecting with nature, by walking through the forest, sitting at the ocean, listening to birds, looking at the sky, and getting her toes in the sand and water.

"That was when that transmutation of the grief and the fear of that fire was turned it around into gratitude and back into the love that I have for the land, my country, and the earth," she said.

Ms Lindhorst hopes to one day exhibit her work, and has recently sold one of the first pieces from her collection.

She imagines she would call the exhibition, 'Beauty in the Sorrow', which was a line in a song composed by her first husband who died when he was just 27. He passed away suddenly a few months after their wedding day, and a month or two into her pregnancy with his son.

"He was an incredibly talented young man and he composed a lot of his own music and one of his songs had a line in it that went, 'there's beauty in the sorrow carved from a heart,' so this is what this all is, it's the beauty in the sorrow. That line has always stayed with me," she said.