LAB publications "I Was Born!": Personal Experience Narratives and Tree-Ring Marker Years Nick Koenig and Erin James. Philosophies 9 (6): 166 (2024) open access link Unsettling Fire: Recognizing Narrative Compassion Erin James, Jack Kredell, Jennifer Ladino, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Kayla Bordelon, and Michael Decker. Narrative 32.3 (October 2024). PDF available Building a Geospatial Archive of Species Loss as a Response to Local Caribou Extinction Jack Kredell, Chris Lamb, and Devin Becker. Environmental Humanities 17.1 (March 1, 2025). PDF available Why Worry? The Utility of Fear for Climate Justice Jennifer Ladino. Climate Justice Educators Toolkit. Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024. link to projejct Telling Climate Truths: Harnessing Storytelling for Rural Communities Jennifer Ladino. Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice . Mallory McDuff, ed. Broadleaf Books, 2023. link to book Fiction, Belief, and Climate Change Erin James. The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief . Alison James , Akihiro Kubo , Françoise Lavocat , eds. Routledge, 2023. link to book The Potential for Changing Public Perception on Climate Change Through Narratives Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra, Jennifer K. Ladino, Erin James, John W. Anderson, Matt Grindal, and Markie McBrayer. Sociology Compass , 19: e70046. open access link Fuels and Ladders: Catalizing the "Fire Humanities" for Fire Adaptation Sasha Michelle White. FAC Net , November 2, 2023. open access link The Power of Prescribed Fire: A Wildfire Journalist Steps Behind the Drip Torch Kylie Mohr. High Country News , February 1, 2025. open access link How Nostalgia Drives and Derails Living with Wildland Fire in the American West Jennifer Ladino, Leda N. Kobziar, Jack Kredell, & Teresa Cavazos Cohn, editor: Natasha Ribeiro Fire, 2022 open access link Feeling skeptical: Worry, dread, and support for environmental policy among climate change skeptics Kristin Haltinner, Jennifer Ladino, & Dilshani Sarathchandra Emotion, Space & Society, v.39, 2021 PDF available LAB reports: 2019 - 25 2022 2021 2020 2019

The Confluence Lab engages in creative interdisciplinary research projects that bring together scholars in the arts, humanities, and sciences, together with community members, to engage in environmental issues impacting rural communities. Celebrating the Artists-in-Fire Crew project spotlight: The Confluence Lab’s inaugural Artists-In-Fire (AIF) residency is supporting artists and writers from the Pacific Northwest and adjacent regions as boots-on-the-ground participants in prescribed fire. Over the course of 2024, they will travel individually to participate in a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX ) or other immersive, prescribed fire experience. Returning home, AIF artists and writers will reflect upon their experiences through their creative practices and share those reflections with their home communities. read more AIF Sam Chadwick with other participants of WTREX at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in Nebraska in April 2024. Artist-in-Fire Spolight: Jennifer Yu Artist-in-Fire Spolight: Kylie Mohr Our central premise is that the tools of the humanities and arts—especially those related to storytelling, representation, emotions, and communication—are important complements to scientific knowledge and can help develop novel approaches to environmental issues. We use the creativity generated through interdisciplinary and community-based approaches to partner with diverse communities on pragmatic projects that work toward more just, sustainable, and equitable futures, focusing especially on issues such as public land use, wildland fire and fire management, and the causes and effects of climate change. our primary goal thanks to our research partners & affliates: College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences College of Natural Resources College of Art & Architecture Read More About Our History lab stories & news Sightlines "Just Futures" Sightlines "When the Smoke Clears" Sightlines "The Future is Patchy" read more

AIF crew 2024 Adam Huggins Galiano Island, BC, Canada Adam Huggins is an artist, podcaster, practitioner of ecological restoration, teacher, and naturalist living in the Salish Sea of southwestern British Columbia, on Galiano Island - the unceded lands and waters of Hul’qumi’num speaking people. As an environmental professional, he implements watershed-scale ecological restoration projects for the Galiano Conservancy Association and teaches a class in the Restoration of Natural Systems program at the University of Victoria. As a storyteller and musician, he produces and co-hosts the Future Ecologies podcast, which is currently wrapping up a 5th season of long-form audio pieces at the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. TREX involvement More on his story in Fall 2024... but until then, Adam notes he is looking forward to this opportunity because "ecologists have hypothesized that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity. I am especially interested in the human diversity of the prescribed fire movement, and so I am most looking forward to meeting the other attendees at the TREX and learning more about who they are, where they are from, and what they hope to accomplish when they return home. " Also give the podcast he produces and co-hosts a listen! Chat back to AIF residency Chat

Confluence Lab intern and MFA candidate Isabel Marlens worked with University of Idaho librarian Evan Williamson to create Fire Lines: Exploring the Legacy of 1910's Great Fire in the Northwest. Fire Lines a Stories of Fire Project Isabel Marlens w/ Evan Williamson Fall 2022 to Spring 2023 supported by the Confluence Lab and the University of Idaho English Department at the University of Idaho Confluence Lab intern and MFA candidate Isabel Marlens worked with University of Idaho librarian Evan Williamson to create Fire Lines: Exploring the Legacy of 1910's Great Fire in the Northwest . This digital humanities creative nonfiction essay combines holdings from UofI's archives with Marlens's original writing on the history of fire management and our evolving cultural understandings of wildfire. The essay, part of the Confluence Lab's Stories of Fire atlas projects , launched in April 2023 and will be part of the permanent collection at UofI's Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning . Fire Lines was supported and informed by the Lab's partnership with the University of Oregon's Just Futures Institute, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. Using JFI research principles and support from Confluence Lab and English faculty, Marlens focused on Idaho's unique history and rural and Indigenous communities. Combining creative nonfiction and historical visual and archival materials, Fire Lines is just one example of the Confluence Lab's ongoing, multidisciplinary efforts to document our region's Stories of Fire. This project is part of the Lab's Stories of Fire Atlas Project. read the FULL ESSAY . Next

AIF crew 2024 Doug Tolman Salt Lake City, UT Doug Tolman is an interdisciplinary artist and place-learner practicing in Great Salt Lake and Colorado River Watersheds. He believes inquiry and dialectic are our strongest tools for solving the West’s socio-ecological problems. He is a recent graduate of the University of Utah MFA program where he received the Frankenthaler Climate Art Award, Global Change and Sustainability Center Fellowship, and College of Fine Arts Research Excellence Fellowship. Residing in the space between sculpture, image, and community work, his practice is informed by place-based youth education, ecological science, and biomechanical travel. The materials and imagery he works with come from burn scars, floodplains, lakebeds, and lava flows, places where geologic and anthropogenic time are in constant dialogue. His collecting process is rooted in generational rock hounding, map reading, and wood carving, which he now employs to deepen and reflect on a complex relationship with the land he calls home. By facilitating generative spaces of inquiry, he attempts to deepen his community’s sense of place in pursuit of solutions to climate and land-use challenges. Doug's TREX reflection Good Fire On The Ground As I sit down to write this reflection in Salt Lake City, wildfire season in my bioregion is in full swing. A fast-running grass fire just happened in the foothills above my house, while big old-growth wildfires are smoldering out in the ranges above both my parents’ and grandmother’s homes in Southern Utah. After 40 hours of asynchronous safety training this past spring, my time as an Artist-in-Fire began as I crossed the Great Basin in my rickety old truck. The basins and ranges passed like waves as I made my way west, Elko, Pyramid Lake, Reno, and finally Plumas County, California to participate in a regional Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX). Before this experience, I’d had minimal direct fire experience - most of my fire knowledge was obtained from stories of my dad’s experience in wildfire suppression, watching smoke columns rise from neighboring mountains, cauterizing wood surfaces with a torch, and exploring burn scars. photo credit: Jade Elhardt The event, Plumas CalTREX was hosted by The Watershed Research & Training Center and Plumas Underburn Cooperative . We were stationed at a summer camp within the scar of the 2021 Dixie Fire. It was a somber background to show up to - nearby Greenville was still in the process of rebuilding. The nerves of being a newcomer to both fire and place settled quickly as I learned how genuine and welcoming this community is; expectations of macho fire culture were quickly dispelled. We were split into crews, following a rigid chain of command which somehow felt non-hierarchical despite the top-down structure. Each day was spent in workshops and drills leading up to a prescribed burn on the property during our final day. Drip torch drills were balanced out by a workshop on cultural burning with Danny YellowFeather Manning. Long, hard hours of digging line were softened by fire art therapy with Zach Browning of the Sierra Institute . Given the setting, structure, and community, it was essentially six days of prescribed fire summer camp. On the final day, everyone gathered to put good fire on the ground. It was very reminiscent of a metal pour - anticipation built as we accepted position assignments, working together toward a common goal as smoke soaked into our fire-resistant clothing. I spent most of my time on holding, using hoses and hand tools to follow and care for the fire as it crept along the property. It felt good to steward the fire as it moved itself along, a living being breathing oxygen and eating carbon. I’m now back home working on an ArcGIS story map that involves prescribed burning of invasive Phragmites weeds here at Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve , and spending time building Beaver Dam Analogues with Sageland Collaborative - something I see as very adjacent to prescribed burning (Beavers after all were taken from the West around the same time as good fire, the lower water table and channelized streams left behind are closely associated with increased fire danger ). Though nothing concretely in the realm of art has propagated, the impacts of seeing good fire on the ground have trickled into my everyday life and work, the line of inquiry is continuing to grow and integrate. By the time an opportunity opens, hopefully this line of inquiry has developed into a place for an installation piece. My Final Takeaways: Buffer the corner, corners are where most problems happen. Fire is a life form that breathes oxygen and eats carbon. Oaks are prized and cared for in the Sierra, but are seen as ubiquitous in the Wasatch. Land tells what it needs, spend the time to listen. -Doug Tolman, summer 2024

Narrative Science Training in Narrative and Emotional Literacy for Science Practitioners Erin James, Jennifer Ladino, and Teresa Cavazos Cohn Fall 2023 to present Narrative science is an innovative approach to science communication and practice that foregrounds the role of stories, storytelling, and emotions in the scientific process. The idea that science needs a good story is not new; indeed, many specialists in science communication emphasize the need for scientists to become more adept at using stories to disseminate their work to an increasingly apathetic or resistant public. What is new is the idea that science is storied from the start—that narratives and their corresponding emotions play a significant role in all stages of scientific inquiry, from hypothesis formation through to the communication of results. As such, we can do better than to conceive of story as an “add-on” or container into which scientists must pour their work to make it palatable to broader audiences. Instead, narrative science helps make the narratives and emotions that inform science legible to scientists and identifies the storytelling strategies that best harness those narratives and emotions for particular audiences. Narrative science begins with the idea that narrative—more commonly known as story—is not only a vehicle for sharing scientific knowledge but also a powerful sense-making device. By this we mean that narrative is more than a communicative tool. It is the primary mechanism by which humans think and understand their world, and thus is always present in the observations that we make, the questions that we ask, and the methods by which we go about answering those questions. Humans think in narrative, and those narratives are innately emotional. The primary goal of narrative science is thus the “restorying” of science—the recovery of the narratives and corresponding emotions that inform a specific scientific project—and the development of new stories and emotions to communicate that project to various target audiences. Interested in Narrative Science training? Contact us at theconfluencelab@gmail.com .

our story Like many good stories, the story of The Confluence Lab starts with a road trip. In September of 2018, Jenn Ladino and Erin James travelled from Moscow, Idaho, to the Taft-Nicholson Center for the Environmental Humanities to share research and institutional strategies with a regional network of environmental humanities scholars. The Center, a branch campus of the University of Utah located in the Centennial Valley in Southern Montana, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is a place of tensions. The campus is situated atop an abandoned ghost town that the university benefactors had exhumed and restored some years earlier. (We stayed in the cabin called “Jail,” with metal bars on the windows, which had been fully buried underground just a few years before.) It’s a wild enough location that grizzly protocol meant always walking in pairs, but where the closest neighbors, 8 miles down the road, are the powerful political activists the Koch brothers. Before we left, our geography colleague, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, had enigmatically warned us to “look out for the polar bear.” Now, this valley is home to elk, moose, and pronghorn, among other land-dwellers, and over 260 species of birds, including peregrine falcons, sand hill cranes, and trumpeter swans. But try as we might, we couldn’t spot any polar bears. That is, until we came across a pristine taxidermied full-sized adult polar bear in the living room of the house of the Center’s benefactor during a reception. We sipped cocktails as the bear loomed over us, chatting with the benefactor about wilderness and the changing nature of the American West while this preserved hypercarnivore stood frozen by our side. During the nine-hour car ride back to Moscow, our conversation kept coming back to the bear. For the benefactor, having the bear in her house made total sense—it was a symbol of what is disappearing from the pristine wilderness that she hopes the Center is protecting, a symbol of the emotions that she feels for this place. For Jenn and Erin, the bear helped us unpack the narratives of wilderness and “untouched” nature that still have sociopolitical impacts in the West and elsewhere in our increasingly divided country. Beyond our excitement at having solved Teresa’s treasure hunt, the polar bear was a powerful reminder of how a symbol can travel and stand in for emotions and stories that are often buried or unacknowledged. The whole experience got us thinking about the surprising yet productive ideas and occasions that get scholars collaborating outside of their comfortable disciplinary silos and outside of our institutions. We left the valley fired up to make things happen on our campus. In the car, we took turns driving and typing, drafting a mission statement (and an embarrassingly bad acronym) and an application for office space for what would soon become The Confluence Lab. We met with Teresa the week we got home, and the three of us excitedly hashed out ideas for public-facing, interdisciplinary work that would study, respond to, and potentially help to mitigate the divisive environmental and cultural issues of our home state of Idaho. The idea for The Confluence Lab was born.

featured artist Margo Geddes Missoula, MT Margo Geddes is an artist in Missoula, MT. Her photographic practice revolves around the intersections between humans and the natural world. From the cultivated landscape of the garden to the effects of people on wild spaces and vice versa, her images look to surface these complex relationships. She holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Oregon and an MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She has shown her work both nationally and internationally. featured artwork "Standing Dead" silver gelatin print, 10in x10in, 2022 "Heart Boulder" silver gelatin print, 10in x10in, 2022 "Black Ground" silver gelatin print, 10in x10in, 2022 responding to Ground Truths Visiting landscapes I have been close to for over a decade in the Bitterroot Mountains, that have been subject to wildfire and establishing a new relationship with the changed space, has been not only a mourning but a discovery, a truth about the ground, the landscape, and it's relationship with impermanence. Fire season has become ubiquitous during the summer months in Montana and places that I have spent a good deal of time hiking, wandering, knowing, have eventually burned. Finding new landscapes in the wreckage left behind has been a form of healing. In early spring of 2020, while driving forest roads in Bitterroot National Forest, I noticed the granitic boulders, previously hidden in the thick forest, that were starkly strewn across the landscape. I began photographing them to explore this new and swiftly changing landscape: as fireweed takes hold and the forest begins to regenerate they will soon be hidden again. The scope of my work has grown to include a larger view of the scarred landscape as a whole, the trees, the revealed topography, the process of regeneration. more from Margo's perspective A view of Granite Pass, where Margo shot some of the images featured in Ground Truths. Granite Pass burned in the summer of 2021. This was shot July 4, 2022. In it one can see the burned slopes and the forest road winding its way through. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured workshop Fire Resilience Design Collaboration In November of 2022, The Confluence Lab had the opportunity to lead a Fire Resilience Workshop in Talent, Oregon, hosted in tandem with Coalición Fortaleza and Our Family Farms. Marking two years since the Almeda Fire of 2020, community leaders from local Rogue Valley organizations started by sharing their stories from the fire, recalling the emotional and physical impacts they experienced. This reflective and connective sharing created a space which moved us into the second half of the workshop. Participants were grouped into teams, given large sheets of poster board and a variety of materials (markers, colored pencils, scissors, tape, yarn, etc.), and asked to map their vision of what it would look like to move forward as a resilient community. There were no parameters given outside of this prompt. Engaged discussion and making took over the room, as just the right language and images were developed for each of the teams’ visions. For some this required the braiding of yarn to capture a sense of interwoven community, while others used layered paper, creating an interactive door to further emphasize a feeling of welcome. The Confluence Lab team’s job was to be attentive to these creative choices as they happened, asking what the goal was of each signifier in relation to the desired message. Once their posters were complete and had been presented, it was shared that as a final step, Megan Davis would transpose their works into unified digital designs. To ensure the integrity of the original concepts and messages was maintained, Megan interviewed team members at the end of the workshop and held review sessions with participants and her team throughout the design process. While both the original and digital works are equally valuable, this final step produces deliverables that can serve the community as shareable files, adaptable to multiple locations and contexts. Whether printed and displayed in shared spaces or sent within a digital platform, the voices of community members can serve as a touchstone as they continue to grow as a resilient Jackson County. results from workshop participants workshop deliverables, designer: Megan Davis featured text: 1. May our needs propel us to break and rebuild the very systems that left us in need in the first place. 2. There is no "wrong door" for service needs. All lead to a connected, resourceful community. 3. Towards a resilient Jackson County, Oregon: We build for the future. We build trust. We honor the lessons. We strive for well-being. We care for each other. We ask what you need. We share best practices. We collaborate. We are inclusive. 4. We open the door to community healing. Megan Davis sharing her experience during the Confluence Lab's presentation "Ground Truths & Grapplings: Apprehending Fire through the Fire Humanities" at the Malcom M. Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Moscow, ID in October 2023 featured designer Megan Davis is a graphic designer passionate about the roles of art and design as key players in social change. She seeks to use design as not only a medium for spreading awareness but as an active agent. As a result, her work has become increasingly oriented around community practice, audience engagement, and in some cases, utilization. Davis has earned her bachelor’s degree in graphic design, worked professionally as a designer in Seattle for 5 years, has held a variety of design volunteer and intern positions ranging from nonprofits in Colorado to Kenya, and is now earning her MFA at The University of Idaho while also teaching undergraduate art courses as the instructor of record. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Martina Shenal Tucson, AZ Martina Shenal is a Professor of Art in the Photography, Video & Imaging area at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She earned her MFA from Arizona State University and BFA from Ohio State University. She has received grants and fellowships including a Faculty Collaboration Grant for her project Space + Place from the UA Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry; WESTAF/NEA Regional Fellowship; Visual Art Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission; Professional Development Grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts; and a Contemporary Forum Material Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum. Her works examine human interactions within the landscape–highlighting the ways humans alter, mediate, and represent it. Since 2019, she has focused her work on framing the rapidly changing climate and the accelerating pace and impact of rising seas, hurricanes, super typhoons, and wildfires. featured artwork "Slash Piles 07" archival pigment print, 28.25in x 22.25in, 2022 "Slash Piles 06" archival pigment print, 28.25in x 22.25in, 2022 "Slash Piles" archival pigment print, 28.25in x 22.25in, 2022 responding to Fuel Loading Over the course of the past decade, I've been engaged in fieldwork in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument in central Oregon. In the fall of 2020, as a respite from the fires that had been burning for 7 weeks in the Santa Catalina mountains here in Tucson, I made my way to Oregon, crossing the border just as the numerous wildfires there began burning. The photographic work for the series 20/20 (notes on visibility) was produced over multiple weeks as smoke from fires burning in California, Oregon, and Washington accumulated in the high desert. The series traces a line from the central high desert westward to the coast, moving from the impacts of smoke to coastal fog. The images included here were made in late November 2022, when I began photographing large slash piles that were staged for upcoming prescribed burns near La Pine, Oregon. I was struck by the sheer size and scale of the accumulated material–it felt like I was entering a series of dwellings or villages. My research led me to read about current efforts to create healthy forest ecosystems by reducing fuel loads during the winter season and reverse the decades-long fire suppression strategies that, in combination with drought-related climate warming effects, beetle infestations and the proliferation of non-native vegetation growth, have left the forests vulnerable to intense wildfires. more from Martina's perspective The slash piles are concentrations of leftover materials associated with ongoing forest management to help maintain and restore healthy ecosystems while reducing hazardous fuels loading. La Pine, Oregon. Also from the series 20/20 (notes of visibility) Smith Rock State Park (collapsed crater), Terrebonne, Oregon. Images made in early September 2020 amid wildfires burning in the west, including CA, WA, MT, & OR Markers in area of ongoing thinning and tree removal, La Pine, Oregon Also from the series 20/20 (notes of visibility), Devil’s Chain (rhyodacite flow), Cascade Lakes Highway, Oregon The series 20/20 (notes on visibility) bears witness to the effects of 2,027 raging wildfires that were burning in the west while doing fieldwork in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument in central Oregon. The title references the ability to see with perfect vision, but the chronology of images produced on this trip reflects just the opposite. The air quality in the high desert was deemed the most hazardous in the world at that time, as similar conditions were playing out across the West, fueled by a mega-drought, high temperatures, and strong winds. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Meredith Ojala Kenmore, WA Meredith Ojala is a multi-media artist and activist from Seattle. Her artwork often delves into the emotional landscapes of environmental and social-justice issues. She worked on environmental campaigns while studying sociology and studio art at Princeton University. She is currently splitting time between Seattle and the Arctic of Sweden. featured artwork "All I See is Red" oil on canvas, 18in x 24in, 2018 responding to Ground Truths After being evacuated from the Erskine fire in 2016, I moved back to the Pacific Northwest hoping the heavier precipitation would ease the wildfire risk. After managing a meditation retreat in Southern Idaho 2018, I had great difficulty driving back to Seattle through all the wildfires in Eastern Oregon and Washington. This painting is part of a set of paintings made at a time when wildfires felt all-encompassing, when the world felt like it was on fire, and my dreams were turning red.These paintings are about sleeping with fire and how wildfires spread into our dreams and subconsciously color our perception of the world. They take us into feelings of falling asleep with wildfire in clear view from our home window; to feelings of being woken up by water-bombers. Wildfires are one of the most beautiful and simultaneously terrifying landscapes I have ever seen. They have taken over many of paintings even when I had no plans to incorporate them. more from Meredith's perspective ... This image was taken near Meredith’s old studio, which was situated on traditional Nehelam, Clatsop, and Chinook territory. Inspiring autumn landscape on traditional sdukʷalbixʷ (Snoqualmie) territory. Meredith’s studio in Haida Gwaii. A collection of political and wildfire landscapes-in-progress fill the space. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Enid Smith Becker Bellevue, WA Enid Smith Becker lives and works in the Seattle area. Inspired by the complex dynamic between humans and the surrounding world, her paintings remind us of how our interactions with nature can transform ourselves and the land. Enid studied art at the University of Washington and has taught art in secondary school. Her paintings are in numerous collections around the US and abroad. In her work for this show, Enid presents a fluid, multifaceted experience that mirrors our own interactions with place and time as we frame our experiences through the screen of a mobile device. The sharp edges of the planes within the painting represent the human influence on the land. The layering of multiple perspectives invites the viewer to see the world through shifting lenses of time, scale, and space. The work is painted in acrylic on canvas. featured artwork "Witness" acrylic on canvas, 30in x 48in, created in response to the Maple fire that burned on the Olympic peninsula in 2018 responding to Ground Truths Witness was created in response to the Maple fire that burned on the Olympic peninsula in 2018. This is a painting of contrasts- the contrast of the organic of the old growth forest and the sharp cut edges of the windows of fire (representing the human impact), the contrast of the cool green of the woods and the hot orange of the fire. If ground truthing establishes the veracity of a map, I see my painting as a verification of reality -a kind of map that asserts the veracity of climate change. Like all my paintings, there is an intentional beauty in the depiction of the natural space in order to draw the viewer in. But the beauty of the old growth forest is broken by the windows of fire. A reminder of what has happened and what will happen if we don't work to protect our natural world. The painting presents a kind of ground truthing for the future- both a warning and an admonition. As a native Washingtonian almost all of my paintings are inspired by the pacific northwest. It's a place I know well and love. I spend a lot of time outdoors. The places I explore and the photos I take are the starting point for my paintings. Within each painting the windows I create tell a story about the place be it a change of season, a new perspective or an event such as a wildfire. more from Enid's perspective Salish Tides, acrylic on canvas, 48in x 72in The Salish Sea, Hood Canal, is a place Enid often goes. Her one room cabin is surrounded by old growth forest. The beach view is the one you see here. It was also from this perspective that Enid watched the Maple fire burn on the Olympic peninsula in 2018, inspiring the painting, Witness. Spring Stream, acrylic on canvas, 24in x 48in This work is inspired by an area that Enid hikes through, just east of Seattle. As is often the case in Enid’s paintings, the sharp edges of the frames within the image represent the human view and action upon the land. Winter Woods , acrylic on canvas, 48in x 72in Enid painted this work a year ago, inspired by a winter storm and how snow drains color from the land it covers. The trunks of the Douglas firs are brown and their branches are dark green, but the effect is one of a black and white landscape. Brighter Haze , acrylic on canvas, 30in x 40in This painting was inspired by the song “Brighter Haze,” written by Enid’s friend, the singer songwriter Kristin Chambers. Chambers wrote it while watching the color of the sky change during a forest fire. Chat back to exhibition Chat