These works are inspired by a collection of photos from fire landscapes I encounter. Initially, my goal in taking these photos was to identify the first plant life after the fire, and while this investigation continues as part of my practice, these pieces departed from those intentions as I became interested in how humans have marked the land before fire and the skeletal remains of trees acting as maps of time, oxygen and carbon.

 

As an artist I attempt to provide evidence of the intricacies of regeneration, of life in the forest. The findings on the ground after a fire reveal the marks of fire itself: lichen, mycology, growth, decay and the complex relationship between human actions and vegetal life. I understand the need for a forest to regenerate itself through fire—yet fear, destruction and abundance of the wildfires in the Pacific Northwest are a new experience that terrifies and humbles me. I hope that my work situates my past with my present in a way that represents the forest—and all that is vegetal—in a reverent and ethical depiction of life.