CURRACLOE RISES FROM
‘Life After the Embers’ is the title of a exhibition of photographs capturing the devastation caused by a major beach fire in Curracloe last July and nature’s amazing powers of recovery in the months afterwards.
When Wexford photographer Alan Mahon went to the scene of the blaze the day after the disaster to take photographs, he was struck by the scale of the destruction.
Approximately 13 acres of sand dunes had been reduced to a charred and blackened landscape that looked like something out of a volcano zone.
Alan returned five months later at the end of December and was surprised and heartened to see a blanket of greenery across the site as the marram grass which holds the dunes together and supports the eco-system of the beach, made a welcome come-back.
He took comparative photographs, ensuring that his camera was positioned and pointed in the exact same locations and directions as before. The result is a beautiful collection of images which are on display at d’Lush Cafe in Wexford Art Centre.
Alan’s reaction on returning to Curracloe in December was ‘Oh gosh, I couldn’t believe how nature had recovered so well. The marram grass is growing back. The small trees were completely burned and are dead but the smaller growth is starting to come back’, he said.
On his first visit 24 hours after the fire broke out, he saw snails that had been completely burned and were still clinging onto wizened blades of grass. He also captured a live lizard that had survived the blaze.
‘I managed to get really close to the lizard as it sat still on the charred ground, with all its natural camoflage gone’, said Alan who lives in Piercestown and is the editor of a greenkeepers’ magazine.
‘In December it was too cold to see lizards but some of the snails had come back. Anything that was two or three inches under the ground would have survived’.
‘The proof is that young seedlings have started to come back and the marram grass roots were able to throw up shoots. Marram grass is what binds the whole system there’, he said.
Some of the photographs taken in the aftermath of the fire, have the quality of abstract art.
‘When I converted the photos to black and white, there wasn’t much difference between the black and white and the colour because of the absence of any kind of colour in the landscape itself. I see it as an artistic thing as well. The colours and hues were very abstract. An artist would have loved it’, said Alan.
One of the images is of blackened maple shrubs rising out of a green carpet of marram grass while a photograph of charred dune vegetation with lines of white sand running down, is like a painting of some strange brooding landscape.
‘I thought that the aftermath photos would make a good panel of pictures to show the effects of the fire but when I went out there five months later and saw how it had recovered, I was amazed. I would have thought it would take years’, said Alan.
An active and award-winning member of Wexford Camera Club, he has been a keen photographer for over 30 years. He has taken many photos of buildings and street scenes at night time and is currently working on a special project focusing on derelict mud-walled cottages that date back to the Famine.