Molten Tongues

An Exhibition in the Language of Fire

Molten Tongues speaks in the primal, alchemical language of fire—a force that warms, consumes, ignites, transforms. Fire is at once origin and omen, a source of life and an agent of destruction.

Presented at Incinerator Gallery, this exhibition brings together works by local and international artists who engage fire as material, metaphor, and memory—tracing its roles across ritual and industry, ceremony and combustion, love and loss, technology and ecology.

Across cultures and temporalities, fire has shaped worlds. From First Nations fire management to funerary burning of ‘hell banknotes’ to the industrial architectures of waste and energy, Molten Tongues explores the many tongues through which fire speaks—molten, flickering, fierce. The exhibition takes its cue from the historic site of the gallery itself: the Essendon Incinerator, a modernist structure designed in 1929 by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. Originally built as an innovative solution to the environmental hazards of an open landfill near the Maribyrnong River, the Essendon Incinerator fused aesthetic vision with civic utility—transmuting waste through flame. Today, this site of combustion becomes a crucible for contemporary and creative reflection: a space where art and design reckon with heat, pollution, renewal, and the stories that smoulder beneath the surface.

Molten Tongues honours cultural burning that cares for Country, mourns the losses scorched by extractive economies, and dreams new futures through the embers of transformation. Fire, here, is a living archive and an oracle—a medium through which we might sense what is burning and what is rising from the ashes.