Stephen King: Firehawks. Review by Corridor8

This review was originally published by Corridor8. Firehawks is available to view as a Virtual Reality exhibition. Open Eye Gallery is hosting an online panel discussion on exploring firesetting behaviour through creative processes on Friday 27 February, 10am–11.30am (RSVP via Eventbrite or join via zoom link).

In 1975, the BBC aired a documentary that shocked audiences. Titled Mini after its protagonist, a ten-year-old boy named Michael (Mini) Cooper who had been placed into the care of his local authority in County Durham on account of his dangerous firesetting behaviour, this documentary by Franc Roddam was a short study of how the state dealt with children with behavioural issues. It’s a heartbreaking watch.

A few years ago, Mini was re-aired by the BBC. Photographer Stephen King happened to be flicking through the channels looking for something to watch and came upon Roddam’s documentary. In his youth, King had also partaken in fire setting behaviour, although he had never been caught or reprimanded. Consequently, this chapter of his life had been consigned to the past and its memories hadn’t received much thought at all.

King’s story is not Mini’s, but firesetting as a response to trauma and a lack of agency is something they both shared. The documentary prompted King to reevaluate his memories of firesetting through the lens of trauma. He learned that this type of behaviour was a common childhood reaction to feeling out of control, particularly for boys and young men. This period of reflection led King to embark on his most personal project to date: ‘Firehawks’, a body of photographic work exploring firesetting in collaboration with fire services and individuals with lived experience. It examines how we can approach these topics with care and open up conversations centred on compassion rather than portioning out blame and promoting shame.

Between 26 September and 16 November 2025, Firehawks was presented at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool. I went to see the show a couple of times during its final week. My first visit was a tour led by King’s producer Angharad Williams, who I’ve known for almost a decade. Williams and I are both producers specialising in socially engaged and collaborative arts practices, and we’ve worked together on numerous projects. As Williams took me through the exhibition I was given an overview of the past five years of development that underpinned Firehawks: the research, bid writing, partnership building, and careful collaboration with those who have contributed their stories. Work developed through a socially engaged practice often belies a complex story of multiple voices. Firehawks was no different and whilst it was important for me to understand the contexts that scaffold the work, the photos spoke for themselves. The interpretation provided by Open Eye Gallery was just enough to guide the viewer without bogging the experience down with an information overload. Or at least this was my experience during a second visit, without Williams and when I was able to sit with King’s images by myself.

Occupying the venue’s two ground floor galleries, the exhibition was curated as a three-part narrative that guided the viewer through three stages: destruction, communication and renewal. There were twenty photos on display and a short film in which King speaks about the project. Each photograph, an analogue print of an intricately composed scene.

Positioned on the far side of gallery one is a large format photograph of a black dog grabbing a charred stick in its jaws. It is unframed and pasted to the wall, it seems to fill the room and it’s the first thing I see. A text panel tells me that the dog is the exhibition’s narrator. The animal is pictured in a burnt landscape of young, spindly, leafless saplings. The sky is grey and the earth is dark brown, stripped by fire. The dog’s glossy coat catches the dull daylight to reflect the animal’s athletic, nimble form, and we see the outline of its ribs mirror the just-alive trees.

It’s a powerful image imbued with metaphor: the Black Dog is synonymous with adult articulations of depression and trauma. This is not a child’s voice, it’s the voice of years-old hindsight that still wrestles with anguish. Speaking with King, I learn that the world the dog inhabits has been carefully built in conversation with those he worked with – the fire services, the young people who’d set fires and were now being supported by fire services’ intervention schemes – as well as from his own memories. The images on show are not simulacra of past events rather interpretations of a collective story; pictures that tell a truth without revealing personal details. Accepting the creature as my guide, I enter into the lore of this dreamscape.

In dreams objects, places and people may appear out of context and often in strange configurations. These imaginary scenes, like collages, allow for new meanings to emerge, or for a subconscious language to be articulated. To the right of the Black Dog are five distinct framed photos: a small plastic bird of prey smoulders underneath a ray of magnified light; a child sits next to a human-size training mannequin like they’re friends and together they fly a kite that looks like a hawk; a person in a black hooded tracksuit lies on tarmacked ground, propped up on their elbows watching toy vehicles burn under a replica of the M62 turn off for Liverpool; the lower half of boy’s face is smeared with soot and his mouth is open to reveal a pile of matches – unused with fiery-red tips – placed like a bonfire on his tongue; a person throws two pieces of crumpled paper out of a window, the paper resembling birds escaping.

To the left of the Black Dog are a further three framed photographs: a plastic doll burns in flames on a discarded mattress; an aerial view (birds’ eye?) of a fire fighter wearing hi-vis uniform walking across burnt grass; a young man who looks uncannily like Ed Sheeran shares a couch with a training dummy. ‘Ed’ and the mannequin are pictured watching a fire fighter simulation game, on the TV screen we see a fire truck by a burning house.

This final image, of Ed Sheeran, is the most strange and disruptive to my reading of the work. Sheeran, a pop star from ‘the real world’, is the only full, unobscured face to feature, and his inclusion seems to jar with the logic of the other images. Why is Ed there? I’m pulled out of my contemplation of trauma responses and childhood experience to find myself staring at Ed wondering if his inclusion is deliberate. Does Sheeran sing about firesetting? I reach for my phone to google an answer but stop and instead make a mental note to ask King about it.

I’m told an anecdote about a young person who looked like Ed Sheeran whom one of the fire services had helped. Wanting to reference this story, King found a professional Sheeran look-a-like. By coincidence, the look-a-like had lived-experience of firesetting as a child and immediately identified with the project. King notes ‘that once you really connect with the people you are working with, stories evolve and end up developing or shifting intentions for planned photos’. Adjusting the storyboarded vision of the Ed Sheeran photo to include the look-a-like’s experience, the final photograph grew to represent something simultaneously more multifaceted and personal than the original idea.

The curatorial team at Open Eye Gallery had wondered if the image should be included due to its ambiguity. King felt that this photograph was vital for scaffolding the exhibition’s logic. He explains that memory, anecdote, research and experience of healing have been woven together to build an experience that is partly destabilising. Being thrown off balance can make us reevaluate what we think we know and open ourselves to fresh perspectives. Indeed, after noticing Ed Sheeran and wondering if it was intentional, I returned to the room as a whole, shifting my reading of what I thought I was looking at: representations of attempts to affect change, or to be seen and heard.

King’s visual language is both precise and obtuse at the same time; it’s as if he has reconstructed a version of a personal inner world – with all its unique reference points – from a collective story. It doesn’t matter if you know the full tale of the two Ed Sheeran look-a-likes or not. Details can often detract and distract from the reality of a person’s feelings. Indeed, as King points out in our conversation over zoom, memories shift and change over time as things are remembered through the lenses of different life stages, or are misremembered and nearly forgotten.

On the far side of Gallery Two is a large format photograph of a leafy woodland area which has been placed to mirror the image of the Black Dog. Contrasting devastation with fecundity introduces themes of healing, growth and rebirth. Running along the wall to the right of these green trees, are a set of five framed photographs that are perhaps the exhibition’s most surreal. These images connect the experience of firesetting with the innocence of childhood and represent some of the methodologies used by the fire service intervention teams to try to prevent children from setting fires.

In the first photograph there is a person-shaped paper-cut-out pegged by its head to a washing line. Here is an exercise in visualising consequences based on real-life tragedy: children are asked to draw around themselves and cut off limbs they may lose if involved in something like a firework accident. The cut-out we see has no fingers. The second photo is of a children’s tea party. A red dragon sits at the head of a table taking the place of the tiger from the famous children’s book The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968). The third photo illustrates the ‘drop and roll’ move that is taught as the ultimate safety measure to perform if you catch on fire. In this scene we see a man rolling on the ground, he is observed by a child who is dressed in a fire officer’s uniform. The fourth photo shows three children sitting around a fire pit, the two eldest film the fire on their phones whilst the youngest (smallest) wears a spiderman suit and holds a pair of white pumps to his chest. Lurking behind the children, in the tall grass, is a dark, cloaked figure wearing a red bear mask. The imagery here is inspired by poems written by children in the fire-prevention scheme. The fifth photo, a girl is kneeling on a bare bed frame whilst clutching a cushion. She is wearing a VR headset, and the door to the room she is in has been left ajar. Behind is a hallway burning in hot flames. I learned from King that this image represents a VR simulation of a house fire and a 999 call that children are asked to watch.

At first glance, these photographs seem reminiscent of fairy tales with imaginary monsters and toys coming to life. Perhaps appearing as tricksy guides for mysterious (adult) worlds. I remember that children navigate life with a different logic to an adult and often conjure up fantasies to fill gaps in knowledge. The additional context of the intervention practices employed by the fire services turns the dream-like quality of these photos into a veneer that masks dangerous realities.

On the wall opposite are three separate images of sandpits. Each one appears to represent a different element of the exhibition’s narrative structure – destruction, communication and renewal – as well as providing examples of Sandplay Therapy. This non-verbal, therapeutic technique is used by the London Fire Brigade Firesetting Intervention Scheme (with whom King worked) to help the children and young people articulate things that may be hard to voice. Partly based on the psychological principles of Carl Jung, this methodology invites participants to recreate memories, thoughts or feelings by building dioramas in sandpits using figurines or models such as Lego. Above King’s sandpit images is a quote from Jung: ‘Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain’. These words not only explain the mechanisms behind Sandplay but also help us understand why some young people may turn to firesetting as a form of communication.

The inspiration for the exhibition’s title, Firehawks, is an Australian bird that creates bushfires by dropping already burning sticks in an attempt to direct prey fleeing an original blaze. They actively transform the landscapes to ensure their survival in times of scarcity or destruction. It’s a beautiful metaphor for this body of work that recasts ‘problematic’ behaviours as a language of trauma. Returning to the image of the leafy trees: this is a site King set fire to as a child, burning it completely. Now the area has fully rejuvenated. It’s an image of hope and life after recovery that goes far beyond King’s individual journey to provide a foundation for conversations about firesetting.

I saw the exhibition before I spoke with King who told me about Mini and its follow-up Jonny Oddball (1985). These documentaries present a boy and later a man who was blamed for acting out of helplessness and, as a result, was institutionalised. This very smart and charming boy who had a difficult home life was locked away and punished rather than being supported to grow into a happy, enabled member of society. As I returned to thinking about the exhibition over the couple of months that followed my visits to the Open Eye Gallery, I also thought of Mini and the ‘what ifs’. What if child-centred care based on understanding had been provided? There will be many like Mini.

In a world run by adults, children and young people are often overlooked and dismissed. A power imbalance between the young and old is perhaps inevitable, but how we choose to build structures of care and support that are accessible to all (i.e. not just within the private structure of ‘the family’) is a collective and societal responsibility. As a body of work, Firehawks provides us with a starting point to how we may reimagine our perception of ‘antisocial’ behaviour and work to enable struggling voices.

Text by Natalie Hughes