Setting fire to childhood trauma
Stephen King;s Firehawks at Open Eye Gallery | My new venture | Latest NW arts news
Have you seen this excellent piece by Laura Brown on the missing piece in Liverpool’s cultural scene? Spoiler: It’s the lack of sustainable arts journalism in the city. She starts by saying: “There’s no arts editor in Liverpool. Did you know that? There used to be, in print, around 15 daily pages on arts activity written about Liverpool, locally, every day.” I know this well because for many years I wrote a large percentage of those pages as Arts Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post (the best job in the world). Later, when I was Arts Editor of the Liverpool Echo I had to do it as an add-on to my existing role as as a manager. It was a juggle, and I never felt able to cover Liverpool arts scene in the comprehensive way it deserved, but at least it was still a statement from the then Echo editor Alistair Machray that the city’s culture mattered.
Things have changed and while there are still people writing about the arts including Stored Honey, Art in Liverpool, Laura’s own Liverpool Almanac, Uncover Liverpool, Liverpool Noise, Double Negative, Art City Liverpool and, sometimes, The Post, as Laura points out: “These arts websites and mailouts are passion projects. Making an affordable income out of it? Are you mad?”
Will things change? I hope so but it’s not likely to happen any time soon. As well as supporting these independent publications, creatives and arts organisations need to find new ways of engaging their audiences and putting bums on seats. Many are doing this well, but it’s more of a challenge for individuals and smaller organisations that have limited financial resources and time.
I would like to help them - you - to do this using my years of experience in online audience development - newsletters, social media, traditional media. I have set up a new social enterprise Raised Voices CIC, which helps creatives and not-for-profits take control of their communications. Instead of doing it all for you on a retainer, which many organisations can’t commit to, we give you the skills and tools to do it yourselves.
Our first offering is Kickstart Your Creative Newsletter, a two-hour workshop for individuals that will help you:
Understand how a newsletter will help you connect with your community of creatives, customers and fans of your work.
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Start a content plan.
We’re keeping the price low for the first two pilot sessions - it’s £30 and subscribers to this newsletter can get 10% off with the code STORED10. If you’re interested, you can…
‘Who have you ever met who’s not drawn to looking at flames?’
When photographer Stephen King talks about the feeling of power he got from setting fire to a piece of wasteland as an eight-year-old boy, his face lights up as if it were being bathed by the flames in his memory. Yet for decades he had completely blocked out the destructive actions of his childhood, and the traumatic experiences that led him to seek such a dangerous form of expression.
Now 50, he has spent the past five years exploring his own motives and working with other firesetters, including young people and adults who set fires in their youth. The result is his new exhibition, Firehawks, at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool.
“I remember it being very exhilarating. I would go to wasteland or places where there would be no one around and light fires,” says King.
“I can remember being in school and I’m eight years old, and just thinking all day that when I get out I am going to go and light a fire. And what is this fire going to be? And how am I going to do it?”
King told no-one he was doing this. It wasn’t for attention and there was nobody else involved. Setting fires was a way of feeling in control at a time when his world was spiralling.
“It was an expression of frustration at not being seen, not being heard. I felt completely out of control. The world had done me wrong but I could have an effect on the world and change it,” he says.
At a time when he could not influence the adults in his life, what a thrill to be able to trigger the actions of other grown-ups. Like many young firesetters, King would sometimes call the fire service to anonymously report his own blazes, and then sit back and watch them rush to the scene: “I made that happen. It felt powerful.”
There is no single procedure for dealing with children who set fires, King says. Fire services across the UK are free to manage the situation differently. Generally, however, kids get away with one or two warnings before, if they’re aged over-10, being charged with arson.
Fortunately for King, he gave it up before he reached the age of criminal responsibility. He began skateboarding, which gave him “meaning, belonging, focus, community, all these things that I didn’t have”, and the fire setting just stopped being part of his life. In fact, he completely stopped thinking about it until, in his early-40s, he watched Frank Roddam’s 1975 documentary Mini, about 11-year-old Michael “Mini” Cooper’s time at a secure assessment centre after he set his home on fire.
“It was literally like a door opening.,” says King. “We’re just watching it, and I was just like, ‘Oh my god. That was me.’”
With that realisation came the memory of the trauma that had sparked his firesetting, and King realised he had to tackle that through therapy and through his photographic practice. He began by revisiting places where he had lit fires, places he hadn’t set foot in for 40 years, to create a series of landscapes.
“I spent a huge amount of time in these places. There were no people there at all, it was completely desolate,” says King. “I shot them all on large format and they’re studio lit with the colour temperature filter of a naked flame.”
One of these, 40 Years later an Orchard, opens the exhibition at Open Eye, which takes visitors through three phases; destruction - communication and renewal. Central to King’s work are the experiences of the people he met during five years of research, a collaboration with Joanna Foster, a leading specialist in the field of child firesetting behaviour. He spent time with fire services that are finding new, therapeutic ways of dealing with young people who set fires, exploring their reasons - usually triggered by trauma - rather than dismissing them as criminals.
King takes a symbolic approach, reimagining and merging elements of people’s stories rather than creating typical portraits. His images take the viewer into a world of distorted fairytales, which capture the threat that looms menacingly over the supposed innocence of childhood.
In one picture, Tiny Tears, taken during the early hours on a beach in Anglesey, a doll lies on a mattress set ablaze, reflecting both the upsetting practice of people setting fire to their own beds, and the story of a girl abandoned by her family in a high rise apartment who would put together a family of Bratz dolls and start melting their plastic bodies.
In another, Crash and Burn, a man recreates the fake road accidents he used to act out with his toys as a child, imagining it involved his dad’s car. King took him to Merseyside Fire Service’s training facility, where fire fighters practice dealing with different scenarios such as house fires and car accidents, and invited him to set up a scene on a fake section of motorway.
“It was almost like a performative piece,” says King. “We did it on this full scale motorway with these electric cars like the ones you see kids going through the parks with. I was like, ‘look, just get into it and let’s see how we get on because I don’t know how this is going to work’. He basically played out what happened on a weird, larger scale.”
The exhibition’s title, Firehawks, comes from the Australian bird that traps its prey by dropping burning sticks from a bushfire. Creatures that are fleeing the original blaze are attracted to, and destroyed by, the flames. - and are then eaten by the firehawks.
It’s a compelling image, the bird creating a trail of flickering lights, and underlines the attraction to fire that is inside all of us. As King says: “Who have you ever met who’s not drawn to looking at flames?”
Firehawks is at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, until Sunday, November 16.
See your work featured in Stored Honey
If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event via this short form or send me an email to tostoredhoney@gmail.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A.
Latest arts news
💤 Hofesh Shechter’s Olivier Award-nominated production Theatre of Dreams will be at Lowry Salford Lowry from Friday, October 24 to Saturday October 25. The production opened at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris ahead of its sold-out UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells and is now touring internationally.
📖 How To Read A Book by writer and artist Stephen Emmerson at the Portico Library in Manchester explores themes of neurodiversity, including dyslexia, by offering visitors an alternative way of approaching books and text. Friday, October 3 to Saturday, March 14, 2026.
❓ Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code, a play about the life of mathematician and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing, is at the Liverpool Playhouse from Tuesday, October 21 to Saturday, October 25.
In case you missed it
Thank you for reading the 146th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed what you read then please hit the ❤️ button as it helps to get it shown more widely.
A reminder that this is your last chance to get Stored Honey at the current price of £4 per month (£40 for an annual subscription) before it increases on October 1. Existing paid subscribers stay at the current rate. Please don’t do it through the iOS Substack app as Apple adds extra charges (explained here). As well as weekly posts like this one, paid members get a monthly guide to the best of what’s on in Liverpool, Manchester and across the North West, new Meet the Artist features and curators’ picks of 5 things to see in their venue.
I’m off now to book my train ticket for the British Textile Biennial press tour. In the meantime, you can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event via this short form or send me an email to tostoredhoney@gmail.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, answer the questions in this Q&A form.
Have a great week,
Laura
P.S. British artists reclaim St George’s flag with a message of inclusivity
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