Stories of Fire is a community-sourced project that hopes to reimagine our shared wildfire story and future fire resilience. Stories of Fire: A Pacific Northwest Climate Justice Atlas Erin James, Jenn Ladino, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Stacy Isenbarger, Sasha Michelle White & Leah Hampton funded by Mellon Foundation Just Futures Inititative 2021 - present Laura Ahola-Young's Mapping Oxygen featured in GROUND TRUTHS . Every word, every image, every memory of wildfire carries a story. A story of fire can engages deep emotions with place, community, and home. In the Pacific Northwest, wildfire experiences can overlap or contradict each other, complicating how we relate to our neighbors and to our changing landscape. Faced with so much complexity, we often simplify or suppress important stories. Traditional maps, media coverage, and even our personal conversations about wildfire can be limited or miss key connections. Stories of Fire is a community-sourced project that hopes to reimagine our shared wildfire story and future fire resilience. This project includes: Online Art & Design Exhibitions Artists-in-Fire immersive prescribed fire residency Community Workshops Using storytelling, visual art, and unique, nontraditional maps from across the region, the Confluence Lab will seek a wide variety of voices as contributors to each part of the project, foregrounding social and environmental justice and traditionally underrepresented rural perspectives. Confluence Lab members Erin James (English), Jennifer Ladino (English), Stacy Isenbarger (Art + Design), and Teresa Cohn (Human Geography), in partnership with local communities, are the primary leads on Stories of Fire. Research fellow Sasha Michelle White (Environmental Science) and our in-residence fellow, Leah Hampton also have key roles in this project. Stories of Fire is one of a suite of projects under the umbrella of the University of Oregon’s Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $4.52 million). The Institute is creating a regional network that works toward racial and climate justice through pedagogical and community engagement initiatives. Learn more about this project. Funding for this project made possible from generous grant from the Mellon Foundation’s “Just Futures ” Initiative for the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice , University of Oregon. Lisa Cristinzo Birch Bark is like Snake Skin acrylic on wood panel, 36in x 48in, 2021 Stories of Fire Online Exhibition Series Learn More Organized into three parts, GROUND TRUTHS (Spring 2023), FUEL LOADING (Fall 2023) and SIGHTLINES (Winter 2024), these online exhibitions were loosely framed by a particular disciplinary lens— cartography, fire management and urban planning—and the range of ways artists express and explore parallel concerns. Confluence Community Workshop: Mapping Fire Recovery in Oregon's Rogue Valley In November 2022 the Confluence Lab partnered with Coalicion Fortaleza and Our Family Farms to lead a fire resiliency and map-making workshop in Oregon’s Rogue Valley. The 2020 Almeda Fire impacted the Rogue Valley/Jackson County area profoundly, and local nonprofit organizers invited a Confluence team to the area for an afternoon of inter-organizational reflection, information sharing, and map making. The resulting maps of organizations and county resources were completed and digitized by a Confluence lab designer Megan Davis at the University of Idaho and given back to local Rogue Valley organizations to help with their future fire resiliency planning and messaging. Read more news from this event. Next

featured artist Julie Mortimer Bellingham, WA Julie Mortimer lives in Bellingham, Washington. With an ever-increasing passion to learn and grow, she has been exploring non-traditional watercolor techniques (such as avoiding dry cakes of color) for several years, and is amazed at what the medium can do. Julie spends hours exploring local wooded areas on a daily basis. This is where she feels most at home. featured artwork "Crow Memories" watercolor, 12in x 16in responding to Ground Truths The air was thick with smoke though the fires were not visible to us. Every night I thought about the myriad animals, escaping if they could. Our area went from having pure cedar fragrances, fog misted air to having the worst air quality in the world. I wondered how the birds could even breathe to escape. more from Julie's perspective Julie out exploring the Pacific Northwest. Julie Mortimer at work in her studio. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artists Sophia Hatzikos Portland, OR Oregon Episcopal School Portland, OR Sophia Hatzikos is a site-specific artist who looks towards our past to evaluate our future. She is concerned with impending environmental collapse and gains insights from experts whose deep knowledge of natural systems comes from their working relationship with the land. Sophia is interested in interdependence and the contrasting fragilities of the natural world and capitalistic demand; she investigates these themes through a scientific lens. Through exploration and observation, she throws light on the ways in which structures and environments have been built over time, giving special attention to the imprints and inerasable marks left by those who wield power. featured artwork "Lift, Coil, Zip" retired wildfire hoses, steel, ties, 2022 responding to Ground Truths This project was a collaboration with students from Oregon Episcopal School who were enrolled in I.M.P.A.C.T (innovate / make / act / collaborate / tinker), a course that encourages experimental thinking about the impact of public art. Discarded fire hoses from the Redmond Fire Cache acted as a throughline to different projects, questions, and themes that were explored by the class. If the fire hoses, used in wildfire suppression during 2020 and 2021, had not become part of the project, they would have gone to a landfill. Using an upcycled material allowed for an expansive creative environment: mistakes could be made and our budget could be spent on other materials to expand the scope of their projects. The students designed individual work around their research into wildfires, climate change, material processes, and the industry of wildfire-fighting, and all thirteen students were involved in the final collaborative effort. Lift, Coil, Zip was shaped through site visits to the Lake Oswego Gallery without Walls , where it has been on display since the fall of 2022. The students were excited by the tall trees around the platform and its location right next to the firehouse. Seeing the environment where their work would live helped finalize the design and the students embraced the process of strategizing and refining ideas for their public art installation. The work will be looking for a new home come August 2023; hopefully, it will stay in the region to continue to tell the story these students crafted! more from their experience Chat back to exhibition Chat

Wilderness Suite Music, Video, and Rephotography Ruby Fulton w/ Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Benjamin James & icarus Quartet Spring 2020 - present video clip of Wilderness Quartet courtesy of icarus Quartet Composition Professor Ruby Fulton (Composition and Music Theory) is currently midway through the research and creation process of “Wilderness Suite,” an evening-length multi-movement piece of music for the celebrated two-pianist, two-percussionist chamber ensemble the icarus Quartet and pre-recorded electronics, in collaboration with U of I filmmaker Benjamin James (English). Their project is an art counterpart to the rephotography project in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, led by geographer Teresa Cavazos Cohn . The project brought the icarus Quartet for a three-day residency at the Lionel Hampton School of Music in February, 2020, when they rehearsed the music in open workshops and presented on their work with music about science. The quartet returned to the Lionel Hampton School of Music in April, 2022 to perform the new music together with film created by Benjamin James, using old and new photographs gathered in Cohn’s scientific study. “Wilderness Suite” uses music and video to examine the impact of humans on the environment, and emphasizes the importance of community in research at every level. This interdisciplinary collaboration between science and the arts will engage both rational and emotional processing systems, maximizing meaning-making and allowing for real communication on the challenging yet pressing question of the impact of human-environmental relationships. The story of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness is more than the science, more than the river, more than the people. Our understanding of wilderness and need for wild spaces differs for each of us. Members of the Confluence Lab — Teresa Cohn, Ruby Fulton, Ben James, and the icarus Quartet — are dedicated to helping people explore their relationship with wilderness including their views of the Frank. listen to more from: Next

AIF crew 2024 Jennifer Yu Moscow, ID Jennifer Yu is the author of three young adult novels, including the forthcoming Grief in the Fourth Dimension. When not writing, you can find her weeping intermittently about the Boston Celtics, photos of the Earth from outer space, and the etymology of the word disaster. She has hopscotched across New England, Southern California, the Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest, but is perhaps happiest when living out of the trunk of her Toyota Corolla. She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. TREX involvement More on her story in Fall 2024... but for now, she is looking forward to the AIF residency's emphasis on embodied learning and experiencing—so valuable to a writer who spends almost all her time parsing the word cognitively, from behind a laptop screen. She is also looking forward to the opportunity to witness fire as a subject of overlapping, sometimes conflicted or competing perspectives—fire as constructed by natural forces, by human practitioners, by scientific research, by culture, by artists, by writers, etc. Chat back to AIF residency Chat

featured artist Anne Acker-Mathieu Seattle, WA Anne Acker-Mathieu has a background in Fiber Art, Graphics, and Painting. Her work is an assimilation of her experience and involves a mixed media approach that utilizes a blend of painting and collage. The employment of mixed media has yielded a body of work that is explosively colorful, movement-oriented, and emotionally thoughtful. As a woman, and a mother of daughters, Anne’s work focuses on justice issues that deeply concern her: women’s rights and social inequality feature prominently in her art. Anne holds a BFA from the Burnley School of Graphic Design at the University of Washington and currently lives with her family in Seattle. featured artwork "Ignition Casino," acrylic collage, 17in x 20in, 2023 "Fields of Fuel," acrylic collage, 45in x 42in, 2022 responding to Fuel Loading As a Seattle native, I have witnessed the Pacific Northwest grow from a sleepy, rainy area to a large metropolitan region with a bustling economy and exploding population that is encroaching the wilderness areas. Growth has brought all the accompanying problems of pollution, overcrowding, loss of habitat, and strains on the natural ecosystems. As a child, I remember having frogs and garter snakes in the woods, because the swamps were not drained, and housing developments were not (yet) in their domain. Today, my children’s summers are void of frogs and snakes, and include checking the wildfire smoke forecast to see if they can safely go for a bike ride. My work is a response to these realities and concerns, to the growing issues of climate change and to the apprehension with which I watch the rises in temperature, drought, and wildfires across the globe. It is becoming difficult to look away. I witness the fear of changing our habits, consumption, and economy–but we are all dependent species who rely on our planet for existence. more from Anne's perspective Anne’s studio: The space where the work is made, and the ideas are examined. City Hell strip at summer’s end: This is the picture of resiliency. This inner-city strip endures drought, excessive heat, dog walkers, and discarded human litter. And yet it survives. It is inspiration every day. The space underneath the grape arbor is my favorite place to think. The junk store assemblage of tin fish and human hands is representative of the endangered PNW salmon, and the hands of humanity that can hopefully work towards the betterment of our world. City Woodland Garden: Living in a highly urban environment, much work has been done to have the garden echo the PNW native forests. The garden is filled with PNW Firs, Cedars, and Hemlocks that will outlive us and hopefully survive future Seattle’s urban sprawl. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Justin Webb Boise, ID photo credit: Emerson Soule with Webb's turn of the century 5" x 7" field camera Justin Webb is a photographer from Boise, ID. He holds a BFA in Visual Studies from Boise State University, where he focused on photography. Justin often works with black and white film, which he believes emphasizes the narrative aspect of each image. Most of Justin’s work is recorded through analog photography using 35mm or 120mm film or his 5” x 7” large-format field camera, although he also records with digital from time to time. Justin develops and prints his film himself, and through this process imparts a level of intimacy and passion into his work. Justin’s art is often about the impacts on our natural environment, both natural and human-caused. He currently spends much of his time documenting and photography these impacts in various places throughout Idaho. featured artwork "Skeletons of Soda Fire 2" Silver Gelatin Print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 "Skeletons of Soda Fire 1" Silver Gelatin Print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 responding to Ground Truths These photos where captured in 2021 in Southwest Idaho; they show the impact on the sage brush and trees killed by the Soda Fire in 2015. I wanted to show the changes to the environment and its personal impact on me, seeing a landscape I grew up exploring stripped of its already limited plant life. These images also relate to the years I spent fighting wildfires in Oregon and Idaho, watching how wildfires have impacted deserts and forests throughout the Pacific Northwest and how their scale and severity is increasing as the climate gets dryer. more from Justin's perspective Personified Camera : Justin took this image while he was photographing the progress of grass growth in an area that the BLM had seed drilled. Justin engages with his home landscape through the lenses of his cameras. Backburn 2006 : Justin took this photo while performing a back burn on fire near FlintCreek located on the Idaho/Oregon border in 2006. Justin finds much of his creativity in the space between his current journey and his past experiences, which he reflects on as his guide. Passing Tree : This image was taken after Justin shot “Soda Fire 2.” He was walking back to his gear before heading to another location. Chat back to exhibition Chat

Emily Schlickman Davis, CA Brett Milligan Davis, CA featured artists Emily Schlickman is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, whose research explores design techniques for accelerated climate change. Schlickman received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MLA from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Brett Milligan is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis. There he is the director of the Metamorphic Landscapes Lab, dedicated to prototyping landscape-based adaptations to conditions of accelerated climatic and environmental change, through extensive fieldwork and transdisciplinary design research. Much of his work is based in California, undoing and reworking colonial legacies of land reclamation, water infrastructure, flood control, and fire suppression. Emily and Brett recently published Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation and Retreat in the Pyrocene. featured artwork Pyro Postcard Series help pick a new mascot Interested in exploring other creatures to to rival Smokey Bear's impact on America's take on fire suppression, Emily & Brett are surveying other options. Cast your vote for a mascot (many featured in the Pyro Postcard series) fitting of our pyro future on their website . responding to SIGHTLINES While we are based in Northern California and most of our work centers on the Sierra Nevada and Coastal Ranges, the questions and considerations we pose transcend political and geographic boundaries, as many places are facing similar wildfire conditions. Pyro Postcards is part of a larger futuring project about wildfire. The project invites collective speculation on the transformative nature of fire and the ways it can change the landscapes of the American West. For one certainty we have is that our fire-prone landscapes will be different from what they are today, and we don’t know exactly what they will become. But, by looking at a few horizons, we can imagine a multitude of futures. In presenting Pyro Postcards , we hope participants can feel their way into possible fiery futures and our potential role in making them. Some are bleak. Some are exciting. Some are just fucking weird and stick in your mind. more from their perspective Image of a prescribed burn Brett helped with to try to restore native grassland and Oak Woodland habitat on the UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve. He likes to assist with intentional burns where and when he can. Yolo County recently launched a prescribed burn association (PBA), a community-based network focused on educating and training residents about intentional fire practices. This is an image of their first burn just north of Capay, California. Emily likes to spend time in burn scars to observe how landscapes respond to wildfire events. This is an ash sample that she collected from the footprint of the LNU Lightning Complex Fires. above: LNU Berryessa left: Quail Ridge Reserve These images are part of photographic documentation Brett takes of landscapes to see how they change and regenerate after wildlife. These locations feature chaparral habitats in California after burning in LNU complex fire in 2020. This is an image of an indigenous-led cooperative burn in Cobb, California. Emily is part of TERA’s on-call ecocultural fire crew for the 2023-2024 season. This is a sample of design work by landscape architecture students Madison Main, Yining Li, Xinyi Gao for the Field Guide to Transformation studio Brett recently taught. In this studio students worked together to re-envision how the UC McLaughlin reserve might become a place for more proactive fire research, offer hands-on experiential learning for students, and foster greater ties to surrounding communities. Chat back to exhibition Chat

a profile of Jennifer Yu by Bailey Lowe My Favorite Activity was Lighting an interview with Kylie Mohr by Bailey Lowe During the Artist-in-Fire Residency Program, environmental journalist Kylie Mohr participated in a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX ) in the northeastern Washington wilderness where she spent two weeks burning sections of land to help prevent the negative effects of natural wildfires in the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell me about yourself. I'm currently a freelance environmental journalist and a correspondent for the magazine called High Country News , and my work really focuses on all things wildfire—everything from the health angle to the ecological angle to what rebuilding and recovery looks like, inequality in those things, and preparedness land management. In addition to wildfire, my work really focuses on wildlife, conservation, public lands, and wildlife and water in the west. These western environmental issues are really front and center in my work and often overlap, which is great. And in addition to High Country News, I publish for a lot of different publications. Some of the biggest titles that I've worked for are National Geographic and the Atlantic, and then a whole host of others—Grist, Vox, Business Insider. I just love getting western stories and environmental issues out to a regional and international audience. What I do has taken me to some really cool places, in addition to getting to play firefighter/firelighter for a couple weeks this fall. I got to spend a night at the top of an old grove tree for an assignment with Sierra Magazine last year, which was really fun. It was crazy. I definitely learned I am terrified of heights and won't be doing that again. I've been to Alaska to report on snowy owls. I got a bunch of cool stuff in Montana and Glacier with some scientists studying pink snow and snow algae in the high alpine. In my background before that, I got a Master’s at the University of Montana in their Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism program. I've got my undergrad from Georgetown. I used to live in Wyoming. I'm from Washington originally. How did you learn about the Artist-in-Fire Residency Program and what made you want to do that? I think I saw a posting for the Artist-in-Fire Residency on Instagram or X or some social media platform. I was instantly like, “ooh, what is this?” Because anytime I can do something that kind of is hands-on and grounds my work in actual lived experiences and being able to do something that not very many people have access to, I immediately was interested in that. I was reading the description, and I was just like, “wow, this this seems incredible and such a cool opportunity.” I think one of the issues with prescribed fire is that it is so hard to get into as a civilian. You don't have the training or the gear or really anything to be a responsible participant. You can't really just show up to one of these things and be like, “hey, I want to help.” And so, even though it's something I read a lot about, I've never (before this fellowship) had the opportunity to actually participate in it and being a journalist, sure, we can go to things and observe, but there's something so different about actually doing alongside people rather than standing 20 feet behind with a notebook. So, the opportunity to do something like that just really jumped out at me, and because I'm a freelancer, one of the benefits of that is I have flexibility to go on a two-week prescribed burn and spend 40 hours over the course of a couple months taking the classes that we needed. What did you do to prepare and what were some of the things you learned in the training? The online training was cool in the sense that I realized I knew more than I thought about fire behavior and firefighting techniques and things like that from my journalism and from my reporting background, so that was nice to see some of my professional knowledge actually integrating into this in a useful way. I participated in a lot of government webinars and things that were a little bit dry at times, but they did give me the basis to understand terminology, techniques, and the basics of the science of fire behaviors, so that I’m not wondering, “Oh, it's really windy today. Why aren't we lighting? Oh, because wind carries fire.” Or, “Oh, it's been really dry. It hasn't rained in a long time. Why aren't we lighting? Oh, okay, because relative humidity and the different fuel moistures matter when you're thinking about how to control a fire and keep it contained and not burning too hot and severe to ruin things rather than regenerate them.” And then the physical training: I think I probably over prepared for that. I was really nervous about not being fit enough to do it, so I got a weighted vest and timed myself speedwalking around a track near my house with the weighted vest and hated that! But then the test was totally fine, so I think I might’ve overprepared for that a bit. I'm in a cool position in that my fiancé was actually a wildland firefighter before we met, and so I was peppering him with so many questions of what to expect or what kind of gear I should buy. That's the other thing, too, that was really helpful about this fellowship: we had the stipend to cover some of our time being spent on all of this, but also to pay for fire boots (because those are super expensive); you have to have certain certified types that go up high enough on your leg and have the right thickness to be fire resistant and all this stuff, and they can be three or four-hundred dollars if I remember correctly. That's a lot if you're not a firefighter and you're never going to wear these around town! You borrow from your TREX all of the Nomex shirts and pants and a fire backpack that carries all your stuff and hard hat. You buy your own gloves, but gloves are cheap at hardware stores. A lot of the prep was not only “how is this all going to work?”, but also “what do I need to not be totally miserable or unsafe?” During the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX ), what was your onsite training and what did your day to day look like? Before we started burning, we had a couple days of part classroom instruction and then also part field instructions. We went around to different stations and learned about all the different pieces on a water engine truck, and how you open and close the hose and nozzles and all this stuff, which it sounds really basic, but you don't necessarily know how to use it in the context of fire. I had this weird tool: I think it was called a combi—a combo tool that you have to screw and unscrew the head in different ways. There were many very basic things that I don't know (as you work behind a computer), and I needed people to be constantly explaining everything to me. So, we did a lot of that kind of training, like “here's how to use a drip torch” and “here's all the steps to screw and unscrew the lid.” It’s just all of this very fine detail that if you're a firefighter, you don't even think about it, but can be confusing if you have never touched these tools in your life. But I learned most by doing and by being a member of different groups. I remember the first day I was like, “wow, I feel really unqualified to be standing here near the fire because I don't totally get what's going on.” But you really do learn very quickly because you're so immersed and because the cool thing about TREX is there are a lot of people there with different skill levels. There are entry level novices as well as full-time firefighters and people that do prescribed burns for a living. You could learn a lot just by observing what they were doing and following orders. That's the other interesting thing about fire culture: it's very militaristic. It's very, “here's your squad leader” and “here's your captain” and “here are the roles you're going to play” and “here's the person that you answer to.” It's very hierarchical. So, to an extent, as long as you follow your little individual orders, then everything is fine—at least in your own little bubble. That was interesting to witness. What was your favorite day/favorite activity? My favorite activity was lighting. You definitely get an appreciation for how pyromaniacs exist! People in fire call it getting bit by the firebug, and I was definitely bit by the firebug. I mean, if you think about it in your daily life, you don't really have very many sanctioned opportunities to light things on fire, right? Like you're lighting a candlewick, you're maybe lighting a campfire, and that's pretty much it. But this is like, “here is a jug full of fuel” and “here's this whole area that you get to burn.” And you do it in a controlled way; there's a lot more to it than just throwing matches and being like, “okay, let's see what happens.” It's very controlled, very slow, very methodical, but also mesmerizing, fascinating, and very fun. Lighting the fires was very challenging physically—the torch is really heavy. The little unit that I burned was on a hill, and so we were walking up and down and up and down and up and down, and you're wearing long sleeves and long pants, carrying a bunch of stuff. You have a bunch of things on your back. I was dripping in sweat. It was absolutely one of the hardest physical things I've ever done, and everyone else was just being really nonchalant about it. My favorite day was the day that I got to light—I think it was a 14- or 15-acre area—with a bunch of other people, and in addition to just the enjoyment of lighting things on fire, it was also really cool to work in tandem as a team with other people. There were people lighting and there were people holding. There was someone who was overseeing all the lighters. Really being part of a team and also feeling like I was a contributing member of that team was awesome, and I feel that just speaks to the uniqueness of the fellowship and TREX in general. Being able to embed in that way and become part of this world temporarily (that is very much not part of my daily world outside of that) was cool. I felt so welcomed by people who were excited to teach and share their skills with someone who was just coming in bright eyed and bushy tailed. How did your understanding of fire change throughout this experience? I learned a couple of things. One, it really struck home to me what I already knew but didn't know quite so viscerally, which is that fighting fire and lighting fire is very hard work, and the people who do it are really putting their bodies on the line to do these things. Even just breathing in smoke from a couple days, I was like, “Wow, I report all the time on how smoke is killing people and how toxic it is, and here are people who are doing this all summer, all fall, all winter.” So that was, I wouldn't say eye opening to me because my eyes were already a bit open to it, but just realizing how tired I was after two weeks and then thinking about people who do this all summer and to a much more extreme extent gave me an even deeper respect for people that work in fire. It also reinforced to me, quite frankly, how many hurdles there are to implement prescribed fire. The sheer amount of planning and checklists and resources and different agencies that were involved, just to do relatively small units on private land was eye opening to me in a way that I found a little depressing at first because I was like, “wow, how are we ever going to be able to scale up prescribed fire to the extent that we need when we are doing all of this for a total of, like, 30 acres?” And plans say that we need to burn millions more acres. I raised that to a couple of people at the training to be like, “what is going on? How is this at all scalable?” And then I learned some of the complexities of burning on private land and how you have to be extra careful when there's a neighbor 20 feet that way. If you're on public land or reservation or just somewhere that has more land mass, you can be a bit more, “okay, we're going to burn this whole area, and it doesn't really matter if it goes a little bit more this way because there's not someone's house and livelihood on the other side of it.” So, my understanding of fire—just the amount of work and human hands that are necessary to do these burns—hit home after all of this. I also gained an appreciation and fascination for fire behavior. I learned about how to have the fire merge toward itself or how to draw a fire away or how to hold a fire in a certain area. It's crazy how you can light fire here, and you can light a bigger fire here, and the fire moves towards itself like a magnet. It's fascinating thinking about how fire goes uphill and downhill. It reminds me of a dance. That has been cool to reflect on. Do you think that this experience will impact or has already impacted your writing? Yeah, definitely. I've written two things specifically from this—the first was a story that was all about the prescribed fire labor force for Business Insider. That was a really awesome opportunity. If you live in the West, you might know about prescribed burns, and you might know why they're necessary, but if you live somewhere else in the country, or if you even live in the west, but you live in Seattle or Portland or something, prescribed burns are probably not really on your radar. The chance to promote awareness of ways to reduce wildfire risk such a huge, national audience was really awesome. I never know who may read that and what they may go do with it, but I'm optimistic that people read my article and maybe opened their mind a little bit, or became curious about what kind of stuff was going on in their state or in their county. I also wrote an essay that's coming out in High Country News that is about my personal reflections on the experience and how it added a more nuanced take on fire for me as a wildfire journalist. I'm excited about this essay because it was really it was fun to write. I don't often write about myself, and that's always kind of scary as a journalist to say what you're thinking and feeling because we're trained not to do that in a lot of ways, so this was a really cool opportunity for me to reflect, write more creatively, and describe things in a more fun way.

featured artist Suze Woolf Seattle, WA Suze Woolf’s work is about human relationships to nature. A painter she explores a range of media from watercolor to paper-casting, from artist books to pyrography and installation--sometimes all together. Her background includes fine art, computer graphics and interface design. She has exhibited throughout the U. S. West and across the United States and Canada, received numerous art awards and held residencies in Zion, Glacier, Capitol Reef and North Cascades National Parks, as well as the Grand Canyon Trust, Banff Centre, Vermont Studio Center, Willowtail Springs, Jentel, PLAYA, Centrum, Mineral School and Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. Her work is represented in both private and regional public collections. Her installation “State of the Forest,” based on 14 years of painting individual burned trees, is currently part of the Environmental Impact II tour ( 2019-2023). featured artwork "Splintered," varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on laser-cut polycarbonate & shaped matboard, 52in x 25in, 2023. An ancient burned juniper from the new BLM wilderness area Oregon Badlands. "Core Values," fabric installation of knit/felted tree cores, woven ice cores, dyed and quilted sediment cores, dimensions variable, up to approx. 18 sq ft, 2023 "Carved Out with Fire Pit," tree: Varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on shaped Gatorboard with wood hanging cradle. fire pit: black paper, rocks, spray-painted gas pump handle, empty propane tank, coal, insulator, corn cobs, 2022. barbed wire, model airplane, model semi-truck and model oil tanker railroad car added 2023 "Logged, Drifted and Burned," varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on shaped foam core with wood hanging cradle, 52in x 25in, 2023. washed-up log found on Newskowin Beach, Oregon. responding to Fuel Loading Raised and based in Seattle, I have watched glaciers shrink and burned forests increase across my home, the Pacific Northwest. At first, I painted beautiful intact landscapes but was increasingly compelled to portray their ecological disturbances: portraits of individual burned trees became my metaphor for human impact. Despite my anxiety, I also see unusual beauty. Fire-carved snags are all the same – carbonized, eaten away; yet each different – the fire’s physics and the tree’s structure create unique sculptures. Painting them is my meditation on climate crisis. Recent expansions of the works have added a "fire pit" in front of the paintings, where the contents are blackened symbols of the largest carbon-emitting sectors: energy production, transportation and agriculture. "Core Values," a "craftivist" installation of hand-made fabric ice, sediment and tree cores, adds speculative, future layers to a scientific data set that only shows the past. Some of the simulated tree cores are burned, some have insect pathogens, some grow faster and some become dimensional lumber; according to OSU’s Dr. Beverly Law, there is more carbon stored in a burned forest than a logged one. more from Suze's perspective The first encounter with the log that was the model for Logged, Drifted & Burned on Newskowin Beach while a 2023 artist-in-residence at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. photo credit: Orchidia Violeta Suzee and friend Chris Moore hiking through the 2021 Cedar Creek burn as she admires the totem that eventually became the painting Burned at the Roots . photo credit: Steve Price. Suze installing After the First Death, a temporary winter installation of the painting After the First Death wrapped around a living tree near Mazama, Washington. photo credit: Ruth Nielsen Chat back to exhibition Chat

AIF crew 2024 Kylie Mohr Missoula, MT Kylie Mohr is an award-winning freelance journalist and High Country News correspondent based in Missoula, Montana. Many of her stories focus on the intersection of science, policy and people in the wildfire space. She's covered everything from how fire impacts evolution to the experience of two hikers trapped by a wildfire. Mohr also writes about conservation, lands, water, wildlife, recreation and climate change in the West. Her editorial bylines include National Geographic, The Atlantic, E&E News/POLITICO, Hakai Magazine, Deseret Magazine, CBS News, Vox, NPR, CNN and more. Mohr earned her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and a master's degree from the University of Montana. When she's not clacking away behind a keyboard, you can find her deep in the backcountry on skis, backpacking through wildflowers, or trail running with her pup, Nuna. TREX involvement More on her story in Fall 2024... but for now, Kylie is very much looking forward to experiencing fire with her own two hands and feet. She writes, talks and thinks about fire often as a journalist covering wildfire, but fire as a force (and a force for good!) still remains abstract to her in some ways. She's excited to experience the preparation and execution of a prescribed fire viscerally, from up close, and be able to translate that experience into future reporting projects. She hope her readers will be able to tell the difference! Chat back to AIF residency Chat

featured artist Kasia Ozga Greensboro, NC Kasia Ozga is a Polish-French-American sculptor and installation artist most recently based between Greensboro, NC and Saint-Étienne, France. She reuses, revalues, and reanimates mass-produced materials into unique artworks and inverts the associations made with different types of waste. Ozga is a former Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship recipient, a Harriet Hale Woolley grantee from the Fondation des Etats-Unis, a Jerome Fellowship recipient at Franconia Sculpture Park, and a Paul-Louis Weiller award recipient from the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. Her work has been exhibited in over 15 different countries and she has participated widely in residencies in Europe and North America, including Shakers, Nekatoenea, Pépinières Européennes de Création, ACRE, and KHN. Currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at UNCG, Ozga holds a PhD from the University of Paris 8, an MFA from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and a BFA from the SMFA at Tufts University, Boston. featured artwork "RE_MOVE N.22" batik, ink, and watercolor pencil on handmade paper, 2020 "RE_MOVE N.24" batik, ink, and watercolor pencil on handmade paper, 2020 responding to SIGHTLINES My work begins and ends in the human body. Our remnants (what we cast off and leave behind in the form of waste, trash, memory etc.) ground and connect us to the earth. My work asks where the things in our lives come from and where they go once we’ve used them. By representing and re-animating remains, I explore the potential of materials to ask questions and to evoke larger environmental relationships. I reuse and revalue ordinary and mass produced materials into something one-of-a-kind. The RE_MOVE series is the product of a transatlantic dialogue in image and text from 2019-2020 between myself and poet Dan Rosenberg. The images engage a batik process with materials reclaimed from multiple former and ongoing projects including handmade paper, architectural drawing templates, thread, and found pigments. Fire, and its effects on the built and natural environments from the Notre Dame Cathedral in France to forests in North America, is a recurring theme in the series. I have visited the Pacific Northwest several times over the past few years, primarily during the summer months. These trips have been marked by moments of wonder at the immense scale of the region's trees and open spaces and exhaustion from the intense thick smoke that blankets the region when forest fires are in abundance. From the stark rocky beaches of the Pacific Coast to primordial tree trunks at Olympic National Park to mountain meadows blooming for brief windows of opportunity near Mount Rainier to hazy orange skies at Glacier National Park, I am drawn to these places that reify the natural and invite me to question how we as a species shape our landscapes in the context of the Anthropocene. more from Kasia's perspective Photos taken by Kasia from a moving train in Glacier National Park in Montana during an extensive fire episode on the West Coast in 2021. Hazy skies have begun to appear earlier and earlier in the region, from year to year, as heat and particulate pollution increase. The acrid taste of warm thick air affects our lungs, but also our eyes, changing how we perceive the natural environment even in sites associated with pristine beauty and fresh, reinvigorating experiences for the body and mind. Chat back to exhibition Chat