‘It couldn’t be more relevant’: Shaun Gladwell on Arthur Boyd’s most enigmatic work

The acclaimed visual artist is on fire (literally) in his new commission at Bundanon.

Shaun Gladwell swipes through his phone, showing me pictures of himself set alight in a flaming ball of fire and diving headfirst off a seven-metre cliff. “I’ve got socks and gloves on so even though you’re really on fire, you’re not getting burnt. It’s actually not a bad process,” he says.

He swipes through more images, this time of massive orange flames spitting from his mouth against the dark Shoalhaven night, echoing his own Maximus swept out to sea (Wattamolla) (2012-13), the extended riff on his MaddestMaximvs series, Australia’s entry at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

“I had to drink kero. Kerosene is like jet fuel. Drinking petrol is not so bad because it’s lower octane, but with kero ... Look, it doesn’t matter. But you have to put a bit of orange juice in the kero so you don’t gag on it or you can get real sick.”

More than just the ramblings of a pyro, the stills are an early look at Gladwell’s new large-scale video projection work for Man on Fire: Visions of Nebuchadnezzar, Bundanon’s upcoming exhibition of Arthur Boyd’s most enigmatic paintings.

In 1966, Boyd – so affected by the pacifist martyrdom of Buddhist monks who self-immolated in protest of the US war in Vietnam – painted his first work in his Nebuchadnezzar series, inspired by the biblical tale of the Babylonian king in seventh-century BC Mesopotamia who was cast into the wild by God as punishment against his pride and hubris.

The subject conjures immediate parallels to our current political climate. In February 2024, US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington in protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Across centuries, the tale of Nebuchadnezzar’s cosmic demise has inspired interpretations from William Blake to Kanye West. Gladwell, who first encountered the story in the Book of Daniel as a 10-year-old in his Christian youth study group, sees its relevance everywhere.

“[Bundanon curator Sophie O’Brien] and I have been riffing on the idea that all men in society possibly have these things called ‘Neb cycles’, where we f— up so bad that we’re cast out, or recognise that we’ve come up short and take ourselves into self-imposed exile,” he says. “Which is basically like being at the pub and telling the bouncers, ‘I’ll see myself out.’”

At 54, Gladwell has the energy of a wound-up whippet. When I meet him at PALAS art gallery in Sydney’s inner-city (the Zetland gallery is co-owned by his partner, curator Tania Doropoulos), he trudges