LAB publications 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 annual LAB reports: 2022 2021 2020 2019

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

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

featured artists Alice, Maggie, & Rob Keefe Potlatch, ID Alice, Maggie, and Rob Keefe live together in Potlatch, Idaho. Together, they study fire from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. Maggie Keefe is a self-taught watercolor artist in Potlatch, Idaho. Her art is inspired by local landscapes. Rob Keefe is an Associate Professor in the College of Natural Resources and Director of the University of Idaho Experimental Forest (UIEF). Alice is 9 years old. When she’s not doing art with her mom in her studio, she likes to play with her 11 month-old goats (Coconut and Cream), make meals for her chickens (Buffy, Suns, Peach, and Spot), compose music, and go hiking, biking, and skiing in the forest. ​ ​ featured artwork Maggie Keefe's "Upper Hatter Rx" watercolor Maggie Keefe's "West of Cabin Rx" watercolor responding to Ground Truths The painting Upper Hatter Rx shows a prescribed burn on the West Hatter Unit of the University of Idaho Experimental Forest in Princeton, Idaho in Fall 2017. Fire was used as a silvicultural tool to prepare the site for regeneration of a new forest stand following harvesting. The burn simulates the effects of stand-replacing fire on the landscape: Fire behavior was aggressive and most woody fuels accumulated over the preceding decades were consumed. Competing vegetation was removed. Following the burn, seedlings were planted in conditions similar to those they would experience following wildfire. West of Cabin Rx shows the use of low-intensity fire at the Flat Creek Unit of the University of Idaho Experimental Forest in Fall 2019. We burned in the understory midway through the development of a ponderosa pine stand adjacent to the Flat Creek Cabin in Harvard, Idaho. Our objectives were to reduce grass and shrub fuels, reduce accumulated woody debris, kill the lower branches of trees to raise the base height of their crowns, and to increase the chances that firefighters can successfully suppress wildfires that occur on the Experimental Forest in the future. Coupled with managing stand density, prescribed fire is one our most effective tools for reducing wildfire in the Pacific Northwest; these paintings show the use of good fire in forests on the Palouse Range. Alice Keefe collage responding to Ground Truths My piece of art is an abstract collage of what wildfire means to my soul. My imagination decided to put its own spin on it. I have gone to the forest before when my dad was doing prescribed burns and seeing the flames for myself disappearing into the air as they burn down the pile inspired my imagination. more from their perspective Maggie painting outside Rob Keefe at work UIEF night burn Sammi Schendel-Melen, student staff, responding to 17-acre Basalt Hill lightning ignited wildfire in the University of Idaho Experimental Forest on July 7, 2021. UIEF Hatter Burn 2021 UIEF East Hatter slash piles 2020 UIEF South Flat RX 2017: large-scale fuel treatment to reduce hazard near Hatter Creek in Princeton, ID on the north side of the mountain. Chat back to exhibition Chat

Human & Ecological Change in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness: A Collaborative Rephotography Project Teresa Cavazos Cohn ... ... A team of faculty and students, led by Dr. Teresa Cavazos Cohn (Natural Resources and Society), is using rephotography methods to examine social and ecological change in this wilderness setting. In addition to compiling historical-current photograph pairs, researchers will conduct semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders in order to better understand interpretations of change, which may differ between cultural groups. ​ The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness is an ideal location for repeat photography. First, many areas have been photographed by residents, outfitters, and recreationists over the past century and pre- and post- wilderness designation impacted use in ways that are visible on the landscape. Second, vegetation in some areas have dramatically changed due to an increase of forest fire as well as invasive species such as cheat grass (Bromus tectorum). We believe photo sets are both visually compelling (and of interest to the general public) as well as informative for broader discussions of change in the Frank Church-River of No Return. Photographs will be housed in the U of I digital photo archives. ​ This project is funded by the DeVlieg Foundation. Next

featured artist Andreas Rutkauskas Kelowna, British Columbia Andreas Rutkauskas has been making photographs of landscapes for over twenty years, six of which have been dedicated to the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire. His past projects have focused on land that has been transformed through the implementation of a range of technologies, including surveillance along the Canada/U.S. border and cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization in Canada’s oil patch. He was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment (2020), a research fellow with the Canadian Photography Institute (2018), and was a finalist for the Gabriele Basilico International Prize in Architecture and Landscape (2016). His work is held in private and public collections, including the Canadian War Museum, and the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery. Andreas currently teaches photography at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, on unceded Syilx territory. featured artwork McDougall Creek Fire, from the series Silent Witnesses Inkjet print on Baryta, mounted on dibond 40x50” 2023 Nk’Mip Fire, from the series Silent Witnesses Inkjet print on Baryta, mounted on dibond 30" x 40” 2023 Underdown Creek Fire, from the series Silent Witnesses Inkjet print on Baryta, mounted on dibond 40x30” 2023 McDougall Creek Fire, from the series Silent Witnesses Inkjet print on Baryta, mounted on dibond 40x50” 2023 responding to SIGHTLINES The Okanagan Valley, where I have resided since 2016, is an incredibly diverse ecoregion, including the forests typically associated with the PNW and valley bottoms of open Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forest interspersed with shrub-steppe. My six years of research into fire began with a simple question: what does the aftermath of a wildfire look like? Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba and having resided in Montréal for twelve years, fire on the land was a new and fascinating phenomenon to me as an artist using photography. I continue to make new discoveries and to be fascinated by fire’s power to sculpt the land. Silent Witnesses marks a paradigm shift in my ongoing research into the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire. Whereas my earlier images of wildfire focused specifically on optimistic representations of renewal within fire-adapted ecosystems, my approach since May 2023 has relied on outdoor strobes and a digital medium format camera system to highlight individual trees or selected members of a community. My goal is to create contrast between what has been lost, what has changed and what is returning, and to produce these contrasts within a single frame. While working on this project in the Okanagan Valley, the city I currently call home went through a massive firestorm. My most recent images depict literal sightlines that have opened up in the wake of the McDougall Creek wildfire. A once scruffy Douglas fir and lodgepole pine ridge crest to the west of the city now provides abundant views and a striking example of how close this fire, which claimed nearly 200 homes, came to engulfing thousands more properties. more from Andreas' perspective On August 17, 2023 the McDougall Creek wildfire tore through communities along the Western shore of Okanagan Lake, including the City of West Kelowna. Andreas watched its progress from the other side of the lake. In the days following the firestorm, thick smoke clouded the valley. People were unable to assess the damage or determine an accurate fire perimeter and tourism was curtailed in the Central Okanagan. In 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire burned over two hundred homes on the outskirts of the City of Kelowna. As the land continues to undergo transformation, Andreas documents the sightlines between this earlier fire and the 2023 firestorm. From thousands of exposures, Andreas narrowed down selections of his Silent Witnesses series to just under one hundred images. Postcard-sized test prints grow to a larger scale as he examines critical focus in preparation for the production of full-sized gallery prints. Andreas' work on view in his exhibition Éveil at the Musée regional de Rimouski, Québec. Oct. 6, 2023 – Feb. 4, 2024. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Jean Arnold Pullman, WA Jean Arnold is a professional visual artist residing in Pullman, WA. She has exhibited her artwork in numerous solo and group shows, regionally and nationally. Her work isfound in many public, corporate, and private collections. She was included in a 2021 exhibit at the Missoula Art Museum, EDGE OF THE ABYSS: ARTISTS PICTURING THE BERKELEY PIT. In 2022, Arnold had a two-person show with Ellen Vieth at Moscow Contemporary in Moscow, ID. Arnold earned her MFA in 1999 from Northern Vermont University (previously Johnson State College), in conjunction with the Vermont Studio Center, where she received guidance from numerous artistic luminaries. After graduate school, she worked with the urban landscape (while moving through it via mass transit) for almost a decade. Then, her growing concerns about human impacts on the planet (while also living near one of the largest pit mines in the world in Salt Lake City) led her to work with large-scale mining imagery and the issues of extraction. In her various explorations, Jean Arnold is visually engaged with how humans impact the land. ​ Her recent series featured in Ground Truths depicts the burned-out town of Malden, WA to bear witness to the destruction unfolding all around us, due to the ravages of global warming and other ecological imbalances. featured artwork Malden 2: Gutted acrylic on canvas, 20in x 26in, 2022 "Malden 8: Shreds" ink and gouache on paper, 11in x 14in, 2022 "Malden 1: After the Inferno" acrylic on canvas, 20in x 26in, 2020 "Malden 5: Phase Change" gouache on paper, 12in x 14in, 2022 "Malden 3: Remnants" acrylic on canvas, 20in x 22in, 2020 responding to Ground Truths Within a month after a wildfire destroyed nearly all of the town of Malden, WA in 2020, I journeyed there to document the destruction beginning an artistic project of bearing witness to what is unfolding now in many places all around us. I think a lot about the systemic, “Earth Systems” big-picture – about how humans are altering the very basis of existence, and how this is now affecting our very lives. Many people are experiencing devastating losses, the burned-out town of Malden being a prime example. Increasingly we are confronted with scenes of wreckage, whether from fire, flooding, or storms. This is becoming a part of our experienced landscape, as-it-now-is. I so often take an eagle-eye, distant approach to contemplating humanity’s impact upon the land; rendering these scenes of destruction was sobering and humbling, literally bringing me down to earth to consider the impacts of fires and other destructive forces upon peoples’ lives. I consider this series to be an act of bearing witness to challenging subjects which we want to turn away from, an homage or tribute to those who have suffered. Beauty and horror often intermingle in unexpected ways. more from Jean's perspective Steptoe View (study) , watercolor on paper, 7in x 10in, 2022 Malden, WA is set in the Palouse Region in the Pacific Northwest. Here, a sweeping scene from nearby Steptoe Butte captures the rolling contoured farmland that is characteristic of the area. Malden 10: Dissolution , ink and gouache on paper, 14in x 21in, 2023 What was once a beloved home dissolves into chaos and entropy. Malden 9: Resurgence , oil on canvas, 8in x 10in, 2022 The human impulse to look for signs of hope runs deep. New growth appears to arise from the ashes of complete destruction. The artist’s studio may look cluttered, but it is organized chaos. Malden 4: Loss , oil on canvas, 18in x 20in, 2022 How might such a scene of devastation be experienced by those whom have lost everything? The effects of breakdown are captured by the qualities of the paint itself. ​ Chat back to exhibition Chat

Jennifer Ladino LAB CO-FOUNDER Professor, English Department University of Idaho jladino at uidaho.edu Erin James LAB CO-FOUNDER Professor, English Department University of Idaho ejames at uidaho.edu Teresa Cavazos Cohn LAB CO-FOUNDER Associate Professor, Department of Natural Resources & the Environment, University of New Hampshire; Climate Change Fellow, Harvard Divinity School teresa.cohn at unh.edu FELLOW IN RESIDENCE Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho, lhampton at uidaho.edu Leah Hampton's website Leah Hampton PRE-DOCTORAL FELLOW Doctoral Student, Environmental Science, University of Idaho Sasha Michelle White PROJECT AFFILIATE Regional Fire Specialist: Willamette Valley/North Cascades, OSU Extension Fire Program Kayla Bordelon GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT Doctoral Candidate, Environmental Science, University of Idaho Jack Kredell GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT Doctoral Candidate, College of Natural Resources, University of Idaho Phinehas Lampman Devin Becker PROJECT PARTNER Program Head Library, University of Idaho Devin Becker's website Ruby Fulton PROJECT PARTNER Composer and Musician Ruby Fulton's website Kristin Haltinner PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Academic Certificate in Diversity and Inclusion Jeffrey Hicke PROJECT PARTNER Professor of Geography, University of Idaho Stacy Isenbarger PROJECT PARTNER Mixed-media Artist Associate Professor of Art + Design , University of Idaho Stacy Isenbarger's website Benjamin James PROJECT PARTNER Clinical Assistant Professor, Film & TV studies, University of Idaho Leda Kobziar PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor, Wildland Fire Science, Director, Master of Natural Resources Dilshani Sarathchandra PROJECT PARTNER Associate Professor of Sociology , University of Idaho Evan Williamson PROJECT PARTNER Digital Infrastructure Librarian, University of Idaho Evan Williamson's website RESEARCHER Creative Writer, Bellingham, WA North Bennett GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, Art + Design, University of Idaho Megan Davis website Megan Davis GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English / Natural Resources, University of Idaho Kelsey Evans GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Emily Holmes GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Daniel Lurie GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT MFA, English, University of Idaho Isabel Marlens John Anderson AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor, Virtural Technology Lab Co-Manager, University of Idaho Bert Baumgaertner AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho Kerri Clement AFFILIATED MEMBER Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, University of Idaho Rob Ely AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science, University of Idaho ​ Matthew Grindal AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor, Department of Culture, Society & Justice, University of Idaho Leontina Hormel AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor of Sociology University of Idaho Graham Hubbs AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Politics and Philosophy, University of Idaho Ryan S. Lincoln AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, University of Idaho Markie McBrayer AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Idaho Ryanne Pilgeram AFFILIATED MEMBER Professor of Sociology, University of Idaho Aleta Quinn AFFILIATED MEMBER Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Idaho David Roon AFFILIATED MEMBER Clinical Assistant Professor of Ecology and Conservation Biology, University of Idaho Scott Slovic AFFILIATED MEMBER University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho Rochelle Smith AFFILIATED MEMBER Reference & Instruction Librarian, University of Idaho Alexandra Teague AFFILIATED MEMBER Associate Chair, Professor of English, Co-Director of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Idaho Alexandra Teague's website Lee Vierling AFFILIATED MEMBER University Distinguished Professor, Director of the Environmental Science Program and Department Head, Natural Resources and Society, University of Idaho

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

Stories of Fire On line Exhibition Ser ies Part II: Anne Acker-Mathieu Ignition Casino acrylic collage, 17in x 20in, 2023 Fire depends on the fuels that feed it. Together with topography and weather, fuels determine a wildfire’s behavior: where it burns, how quickly it spreads, how hot it gets. Fire managers use the term “fuel loading” to categorize the amounts and types of vegetative fuels in a given area. But whether dry grasses, shrubs, dense stands of conifers or logging slash, the accumulation of fuels on the landscape reflects both the ecological processes and the cultural and social imperatives that shape land management. Fire suppression and industrialized land use, structural racial and economic disparities, residential development, roads and recreation, the support or hindrance of ecological stewardship and Indigenous fire sovereignty: all these “fuels” load onto the landscape as uneven densities, distributions and renewals. As the second part of the Stories of Fire online exhibition series, FUEL LOADING showcases creative works that reckon with the accumulations of fuels in the Pacific Northwest and surrounding regions. These works engage a broad conception of fuel loading to measure the weights, densities and arrangements of fuels across ecological, social and material landscapes. They celebrate the dynamic potential of fire, while also pressing on the build-ups, sparks and residues that contribute to flammability. They attend to the fuels themselves and ask how fire and justice converge. “The whole earth is fuel-loaded; there is nowhere apart and smoke drifts easily across borders ...” Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma Bat Cone Burn, pyrometric project ritual firing. final form: clay, terra sigillata, underglazes, 2014 ​ Suze Woolf 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. This work is presented in collaboration by: And made possible by the generous support of: Martina Shenal clockwise from left: Slash Piles 06, Slash Piles, Slash Piles 07, La Pine, Oregon, archival pigment prints, 28.25in x 22.25in, 2022 aj miccio Davis Burn Scar (w/detail) ink on bristol, 11in x 14in, 2023 Lisa Cristinzo How to write a painting acrylic on wood panel, 36in x 48in, 2022 Eric Ondina Nearer My God to Thee 2021 Kate Lund Brush Fit rip-stop nylon, wool, flannel, fleece, 2023 ​ Lisa Cristinzo Marked Trail acrylic on linen, 60in x 82in, 2023 Kelsey Grafton Morphosis ceramic & organic found object, 16in x 4in x 2.5in, 2019 Anne Acker-Mathieu Fields of Fuel acrylic collage, 45in x 42in, 2022 Karin Bolender / Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) RQP Card seemingly an autograph card, one of few existing pictures of the Rodeo Queen of the Pyrocene. “Fuel” is a designation inherently concerned with material and materiality. But, of course, fuel also signifies energy. ​ Erin James read more on how artists are "Feeling Fuel" Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma Pyrometric Whirl Ink, ash, medium, Phos-Chek flame retardant on paper, 84in x 40in, 2017 photo credit: Larry Lytle Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma Pyrometric Landscape ash, medium, Phos-Chek flame retardant on paper; 84in x 40in, 2017 photo credit: Kevin Boland Lisa Cristinzo Birch Bark is like Snake Skin acrylic on wood panel, 36in x 48in, 2021 Suze Woolf 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 Kelsey Grafton Remnant (two views of wall piece) ceramic, 14.5in x 11.5in x 6.5in, 2020 Kelsey Grafton Becoming ceramic, organic materials, found objects, and conviction, 8.3ft x 3ft x 5ft, 2021 Eric Ondina Check emulsion on canvas, 2021 Eric Ondina Inferno 2020 Eric Ondina Hot Leather 3 emulsion on board, 2020 " The planet, like many of us, is experiencing the build up, the burn, and the burn out ." Lisa Cristinzo read more about Fuel Loading's impacts through Erin James' reflective essay Lisa Cristinzo Fraternal Fire acrylic on wood panel, 77in x 60in, 2023 Suze Woolf 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. Suze Woolf 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. Anne Acker-Mathieu The Hand that Feeds You acrylic collage, 22in x 22in, 2023 Amiko Matsuo Zuihitsu video of site-specific, temporary public art project, Seattle, WA, 2023 video credit: Tom Reese further considerations FL Burn Out "The Build Up, the Burn, and the Burn Out" Eric Onida’s Nearer My God to Thee depicts a marching band on fire, or perhaps a marching band emerging from fire; the bright reds of the band’s uniform, coupled with the yellows of their instruments, blend into the fire behind them, such that it’s difficult to tell where music becomes flame and flame becomes music. Onida explains that his paintings, produced with a unique recipe of egg tempera that blends viscous balsam, fossilized hard resins, egg yolk and water, depict “a society in the midst of its discontent, desperately trying to make sense of a destiny that often feels elusive, slipping beyond control and comprehension.” He also notes that paintings such as this one and Check , which similarly depicts an urban gas station emerging from (or perhaps about to be consumed by) threatening red flames that lurk in the background, draw conceptually from the fires depicted by the news media to be consuming the Pacific Northwest to represent “our social malaise as we grapple with the forces of unyielding natural and political environments.” These paintings certainly pose a stark question to me: what is the relationship between marching bands and wildfire? What about the city corner gas station–what role does it play in today’s firescape? Indeed, how, exactly, are ecological and social environments intertwined? Lisa Cristinzo’s Marked Trail poses a similar set of questions. As a Canadian myself, I easily recognize the symbols of Canuck patriotism in her work: the wheat and the geese that frame the painting, the pine cones and snowy, cloudy fields that root us in the North, and the cottage core kitsch of the colored mailboxes, flags, and place signs. These images combine to evoke a knee-jerk sense of national pride–for me, they drudge up an overly simplistic and idealistic idea of Canada that typically lives in a land of maple leaves and syrup. Yet the red brush strokes on the left side of the painting niggle me. These strokes could echo the most iconic of Canadian images: the red leaf, standing brightly against a white background. But they also disturbingly look aflame. Once again, I ask myself: what are the connections between these tokens of national pride–geese, snow, red foliage–and the fires that increasingly appear where we think they should not? And how do these artifacts of culture in and of themselves fuel these fires? Cristinzo’s artist’s statement gives us some answers to these questions. She notes that her current work, including Marked Trail and Birch Bark is like Snakeskin , came to her during a stay in a stone cabin. She began each morning collecting fuel for the wood stove, and “soon came to see the pieces of wood, newspaper, burnable objects, and ash as triangular compositions suitable for painting.” She quickly found herself delaying the fire each morning, pausing first to sketch her fuels before burning them. “Building a fire is a means of building a painting,” she states. Yet her process of accumulation-to-burn also speaks to a problem that she extends to the human species. “Our obsession with possession has caused a warming planet,” she writes, “leading to intense weather systems and catastrophic events. The planet, like many of us, is experiencing the build up, the burn, and the burn out.” This emphasis on the build up, the burn, and the burn out is fitting for an exhibition on Fuel Loading . As the introduction to the exhibition explains, fire managers use this titular term to account for amounts and types of vegetative fuels in a given area. In the Pacific Northwest, these fuels include dry grasses, shrubs, and dense stands of conifers. But Onida and Cristinzo’s work helps us take a much broader view of fuel, not just as materials that accumulate on a forest floor but also as social and cultural practices that facilitate a build up and subsequent burn. Work like Nearer My God to Thee and Marked Trail helps me realize how the everyday practices of my life, including attending the local football game, filling my car with gas, and taking a quick break at a cottage up north, are all part of the complicated network of values, attitudes, and behaviors that shape the world in which I live. Fuel loads, not just via ecological accumulation, but also via social tradition and routine. Eric Ondina, Nearer My God to Thee Lisa Cristinzo, Marked Trail Shenal's Slash Piles 06 & 07 Karin Bolender’s work with the Rural Alchemy Workshop also emphasizes the link between fire and our region’s cultural traditions. Her playful Rodeo Queen of the Pyrocene autograph card presses on, as she explains, “generic myths of the ‘Western Way of Life’ as they manifest in Pacific Northwest forestry, ranching, conservation, and other land-management practices, in both obvious and less visible ways.” The Rodeo Queen’s ghostly face and crown of flames task viewers with the question: How do iconic (and beloved) cultural practices of the North American West respond to an epoch increasingly determined by fire?" She also demands that we rethink the role of cultural ambassadors of this region right now. Bolender explains that the Rodeo Queen “thunders in and out of arena spotlights, waving a spectacular, distracting red flag amidst the more hidden dimensions of cultural, capital, and fossil flows and legacies that shape the land as we (don’t) know it and fuel its range of conflagrations.” What are the Rodeo Queen’s responsibilities to this region and its legacies, both positive and negative, overt and hidden? And what responsibilities do we, as viewers and potential fans, have in protecting the cultural and ecological heritages that she symbolizes before they–and she–burn out? Finally, Marina Shenal’s photographs give a forward-looking spin on the entanglement of ecological and social fuels. Her portraits of slash piles gathered in La Pine, Oregon, in late November 2022, are a much more literal take on fuel loading: they depict the vegetative fuels that have been cleared and piled as part of forest fuels reduction work. In Slash Piles , the scale and size of the accumulated material might appear as a warning. The brown slash piles frame and center the green, living trees as if to highlight the violence and destruction of the clearing that has taken place. What was once living, green, and standing tall is now dead, brown, and on the ground. Yet upon a closer look I also see two additional timelines in Shenal’s photos. One looks backwards to grapple with the accumulation of ecological fuels, due in no small part to the cultural suppression inherent in fire suppression policies. In this timeline, accumulation goes hand-in-hand with erasure: the build up of vegetation in the Pacific Northwest is intimately linked to the nullification of indigenous fire practices that center around the regular implementation of “cultural burns”--controlled fires used to renew the land and culturally important plants and animals. The other timeline looks forward. These slash piles have been staged in colder, wetter months for an upcoming prescribed burn to reduce fuel loads in the forest. Viewing them with a longer, future-facing timeline, I understand them not as symbols of a healthy forest that once was, but as the fuel of the more fire-resilient forest that will be. As Shenal explains, her photographs inspired her to learn more about “efforts to create healthy forest ecosystems” in the Pacific Northwest including “reducing fuel loads during the winter season” to “reverse the decades-long fire suppression strategies that . . . have left the forests vulnerable to intense wildfires.” The intimate, close view of Slash Piles 06 and Slash Piles 07 encourages me to appreciate the intricate beauty of these fuels and reconfigures my understanding of the dead materials as emblems of destruction to those of creation. They signify land management practices that are moving beyond suppression-at-all-costs to embrace the implementation of fire for both ecological and cultural purposes. They thus stand as potent images of a different kind of fuel loading which can support different kinds of fire, renewing social and ecological landscapes. ​ "Feeling Fuel" Kelsey Grafton's Becoming Suze Woolf's Splintered As the introductory statement of the Fuel Loading exhibit makes clear, fire practitioners and managers tend to classify fuels by type: dry grasses, shrubs, dense stands of conifers, logging slash piles, etc. These categories emphasize that “fuel” is a designation inherently concerned with material and materiality. But, of course, fuel also signifies energy, in that fires burn differently depending on the type of material that feeds them: grasses are quick and hot, while slash piles tend to burn slow and steady. It thus makes sense that much of the artwork in the Fuel Loading exhibit foregrounds the energetic presence—and emotional valences—of specific materials. Take, for example, the pieces that make up Kelsey Grafton’s Trees of Morrow series. These sculptures are directly composed of the raw materials of fire’s fuel. As she explains in her artist statement, Grafton draws from her family homestead in Colville, Washington to “hand-harvest earthenware clay, pull textures from fallen structures, and gather artifacts left behind by my ancestors as a way of preserving our fading family history through art-making.” As structures like Becoming and Morphosis illustrate, this material engagement increasingly concerns itself with fire—as the homestead has become vulnerable to wildfire and the family busies themselves with tree thinning and slash pile burning, the fuel that provides the energy to Grafton’s artistic practice becomes the same fuel driving fire prevention measures on the site. For Grafton, this material fuel lends her creative practice an optimistic energy; Becoming clearly juxtaposes preventative burning with new life, as it depicts fresh berries growing from charred wood. Suze Woolf’s work shares this fuel and energy. She was formerly an artist who painted “beautiful intact landscapes,” yet works like Splintered and Logged, Drifted, and Burned provide us with intimate portraits of individual burned trees. This focus and its detailed representation of the fuel’s transformation by fire is a means of mediating Woolf’s anxieties about human impacts on the climate. As she suggests, the carbonized, “eaten away” snags of her paintings task us with finding “unusual beauty” in what is all too easy to dismiss as used up. right: Kate Lund's Brush Fit left: aj miccio's Davis Burn Scar Feeling Fuel Amiko Matsuo + Brad Monsma, Pyrometric Whirl The Northwest Fire Science Consortium’s informational pamphlet “What is Fuel?” tells us that “fuel is the only component of the fire triangle that land owners and managers can influence.” In this declaration, they confidently position fuel as within our control. Yet several of the pieces in Fuel Loading call this confidence into question. Kate Lund’s imposing Brush Fit , which she composed of rip-stop nylon, wool, flannel, and fleece, evokes the emotional experience of being caught in too much fuel—of not being able to influence this particular corner of the fire triangle, no matter the equipment that you have on hand. Lund explains that a “brushfit” is a temper tantrum that you throw “when you succumb to the challenges of walking in an overgrown forest.” The particular brushfit that inspires Lund’s sculpture took place as she and a crew were hiking 50 lb bladder bags into a small fire in the steep terrain of Northern Idaho. Lund and the crew begin their hike with positive attitudes, buoyed in part by their gear and saws. Yet the density of the forest quickly defeated them. She explains: “I remember stopping, grabbing a hold of a tree so that I didn’t roll down the hill, and thinking, What am I doing here? Why do I do this to myself? Why are we even putting this fire out when this whole hillside needs to burn anyway?” Brush Fit powerfully visualizes this transition from idealized expectations to frustrated realities, progressing from clean lines to a frazzled mass that looms over us. The piece is dominated by a literal increase in the density of materials and poses a vital question: how much control over fuels do we have, really? aj miccio’s drawing of the Davis Burn Scar and Anne Acker-Mathieu’s acrylic collages—especially Ignition Casino and Fields of Fuel —replicate the affective tension of Lund’s brushfit. Like Lund’s sculpture, miccio’s drawing and Acker-Mathieu’s paintings relish in the density of visual information to provoke emotional responses from viewers. In their packedness and abundance of detail and color, respectively, they too suggest that we may not be as in control of fuel and/or our emotions as we might assume. The airier pieces in Fuel Loading offer me some relief, albeit fleetingly. Amiko Matsuo and Brad Monsma’s Pyrometric Whirl initially provokes in me the opposite emotional and affective experience of Brush Fit . Whereas my anxiety increases as my eye travels upward in the latter, I feel a sense of calm as I scroll from bottom to top of Matsuo and Monsma’s image. A dense red clump lifts into ethereal black and white whisps, providing me with a sense of upward relief and evaporation. I am released from the brushfit of the painting’s bottom half, finding solace in a dance of vapors. But, fitting to form, this respite is as transitory as the swirling air that evokes it—the longer that I look, the more that bottom half and top half intermesh such that I’m confronted with the process of one becoming the other. The whisps are not relief from the red clump but its latest iteration; as I learn that the red pigment of the painting stems from the fire retardant Phos-chek, I am once again thinking about fuel, feelings, and control. Matsuo and Monsma explain that their work, especially the “wound-like” Phos-check marks on paper, expresses “the ironies of fire suppression rhetoric while also suggesting the rage of a combustion and intolerant political landscape.” “The whole earth is fuel-loaded,” they continue, and their work demands that we grapple with the full extent of our desire to influence any (or all?) parts of the fire triangle. I now see the painting as depicting the transformation of material from a site-specific measure of prevention into a traveling vector of toxicity waiting for our inhale, and become aware of how we, literally, become and embody the very fuels that we add to today’s firescapes. The artists’ connection of the physical and cultural fires that dominate contemporary life in the American West broadens the scope and urgency of this tension: how do our suppression efforts—suppression of fire, but also of political debates and schisms—become fuels in and of themselves? And to what sort of energy do these fuels give rise? ​ further considerations contributed by Confluence Lab member Erin James, December 2023. Next

LAB report 2022 directors' statement: 2022 was an exciting year for the Confluence Lab. In Moscow, Leah Hampton thrived in her role as Fellow In Residence, continuing her work on the narrative backbone of the Pacific Northwest Climate Justice Atlas project and bringing a team of Lab members to Oregon for a community workshop (details below). We were thrilled to welcome Sasha White into the Lab as our two-year Mellon Predoctoral Fellow! Sasha will pursue a PhD in Environmental Science while serving as project coordinator for the Atlas. Together with Megan Davis and other Lab interns, and CDIL’s Evan Williamson, Sasha helped create the “Where There Is Smoke” project , a crowd-sourced digital map that documents experiences of wildfire smoke in the Pacific Northwest and further afield. A companion postcard project invites people to share their experiences of wildfire smoke by mail. Lab Co-founder and Co-director Teresa Cavazos Cohn started her new job as Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources & the Environment at the University of New Hampshire, expanding the Lab into a trans-regional network and leading a new NSF grant proposal to build on our previous pilot project. Lab members Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra also submitted a proposal to NSF, which is under review. The Lab celebrated the graduation of our first PhD student, Kayla Bordelon, as we successfully wrapped up a two-year NSF Stories of Fire project. Kayla was awarded Outstanding PhD Student in the Environmental Science Program! In 2023, our core team will continue building the Atlas of Fire projects and developing novel approaches to science communication that center narrative and emotion in all aspects of the scientific process. Lab member Stacy Isenbarger created a beautiful new website for the Lab. member news Lab Co-founder and Co-director Erin James published a new book, Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State University Press). You can hear her speak about this work on two podcasts: New Books in Literary Studies and Narrative for Social Justice . Lab Co-founder and Co-director Jenn Ladino, along with Leda Kobziar, Jack Kredell, and Teresa Cohn, co-authored an article, “How Nostalgia Drives and Derails Living with Wildland Fire in the American West,” for a special issue of the journal Fire dedicated to Rethinking Wildland Fire Governance. It is a free, open-access publication found HERE . A firefighter reaches to connect with a giant sequoia wrapped in protective fire shelter “blankets” in Sequoia National Park during the CA wildfires of September 2021. Image Credit: Gary Kazanjian, Getty Images. Stacy Isenbarger ’s artwork was featured in various exhibitions throughout the US and Broadsided Press’s Anthology Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 published in April. Isenbarger also had three solo exhibitions including Detachment Sweet Detachment (Betty Foy Sanders Visual Arts Gallery, Georgia Southern University, Armstrong Campus, Savannah, GA), Edged Means: Threshold (College of Western Idaho, Nampa, ID) and Erosion of Air (Gardiner Gallery of Art, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK). Isenbarger installing Porch Song in Savannah, GA. Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra’s forthcoming book Inside the Lives of Climate Change Skeptics (University of Washington Press) features survey and interview data with climate skeptics in the pacific northwest to offer insight into the ways that identity, trust, and ideology shape the complexity of skepticism. Recently they talked about their book in an episode of The Vandal Theory Podcast . Kayla Bordelon completed her PhD and started a new job as Assistant Professor of Practice and Regional Fire Specialist, Western Region, in Oregon State University’s Natural Resources Extension Program. Sasha White exhibited artworks and a collaborative performance piece in the inaugural event for the Fuel Ladder art research group, hosted by the University of Oregon’s Center For Art Research in Eugene, Oregon. The exhibition served as the culminating event for the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute’s “Futures of Work” Symposium, in which Erin James presented on the Stories of Fire Atlas Project. events In November 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 will be completed and digitized by a Confluence graphic designer at the University of Idaho and given back to local Rogue Valley organizations to help with their future fire resiliency planning and messaging. Teresa Cohn, Erin James, and Jenn Ladino co-led a workshop at Colorado College in February to pilot their Narrative Science framework. Images from Confluence Community Workshop: Mapping Fire Recovery in Oregon's Rogue Valley Kayla Bordelon, in her role with the NASA-sponsored Earth to Sky Idaho Regional Hub for Climate Communication, co-coordinated a multi-day professional development workshop for Idaho educators in February: “Recharge: Connecting Educators and Scientists to Explore Water Issues in Idaho.” Jenn Ladino joined her for a session on “Engaging Emotions in Climate Change Education.” In May, Erin James traveled to Boise to participate in that city’s first ever Youth Climate Summit. The event, planned and coordinated by local high school students, asked “How can students use storytelling, arts, and civic engagement to promote climate action?” Erin ran a workshop with over sixty students and high school teachers on how stories can help communicate climate change. ​ The Lab hosted Dr. Peter Kalmus , NASA climate scientist, activist, and author of Being The Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, for a Zoom lecture and conversation on Earth Day, April 22: “Facts Aren’t Enough: Communicating Earth Breakdown.” We are grateful for the co-sponsorship of ENVS, ENGL, JAMM, the Sustainability Center, and the Citizens Climate Lobby. Boise Youth Climate Summit. Photo credit: Jenny Wolf Dr. Peter Kalmus Jenn Ladino and Kayla Bordelon completed the final two community workshops in their IHC-sponsored series, “Our Changing Climate: Finding Common Ground Through Climate Fiction,” in Lewiston and Grangeville in May. Erin was thrilled to receive an invitation to participate in the American Fisheries Society conference in Spokane in August. Organizers of the “Advances in Endogenous Records with Connections to Indigenous Knowledge, Lands, and Waterways” panel sought out the Lab’s expertise in the uses of storytelling in science communication and practice. We featured the research of ENVS PhD students at two working lunches in the fall. In September, Sasha White introduced her creative project, First Aid Kit for the Fire-Prone, which investigates slippages of art, medicine and ecology in Oregon’s fire-prone landscapes; Phin Lampman shared his work in Leda Kobziar’s lab piloting drones equipped with various air samplers, meteorological sensors, and cameras for remote sensing over wildland fires. He even brought in a drone to show us! In November, Jack Kredell and Grace Pevin shared research projects on fire and water at the Taylor Wilderness Research Station, focusing on how environmental change and disturbance plays a critical role in determining scientific as well as personal attachments to landscape. ​ upcoming 2023 events: In conjunction with the Prichard Art Gallery of the University of Idaho, we will host a three-part, juried online art exhibition series called Stories of Fire . This series is organized by Stacy Isenbarger, Sasha White, Megan Davis & North Bennett. Part one, Ground Truths , is scheduled to open online in early April 2023. past reports: 2021 2020 2019

Stories of Fire On line Exhibition Ser ies Part I: If a map is to be used for navigation, it functions only insofar as its relationship to the ground is true. Any map that represents the land from above inherently prioritizes certain features, distorting or omitting others. Scale, resolution and framing, along with what is labeled and what is left out, color the viewer’s relationship with a particular territory and the spatial representations of a map imply particular ways of knowing. Ground truthing is a cartographic practice which seeks to establish the veracity of any given map: how does an embedded experience differ from the abstracted perspective represented by the map? ​ GROUND TRUTHS showcases creative works that experiment with this practice of knowing, engaging on-the-ground perspectives and firsthand experiences of wildfire’s presence (or threat of presence) in the Pacific Northwest. It catalogs the various ways artists are orienting themselves to their changing communities, and how they are thinking through the materials, textures, and living beings of their local landscapes to understand wildfire’s new place in their lives. Through these works, we experience fire as a wild force and a management tool, a lively presence and a haunting specter. We see it through the eyes of children and adults, and stretch into the worldviews of other species, too. As both agent and inspiration, wildfire rips across the landscape, but just as often it finds tinder in the artists’ imaginations. Here, then, we have assembled a map deep and twisted, one that honors the rich sensory, intellectual, and instinctual experiences of wildfire even as it reckons with wildfire’s undeniable material reality. This work is presented in collaboration by: “Seeking truth involves boots on the ground while looking for clues in the clouds.” David Paul Bayles And made possible by the generous support of: Megan Hatch almost there - losing ground archival pigment print, 10in x 27in, 2022 Jean Arnold Malden 3: Remnants acrylic on canvas, 20in x 22in, 2020 Meredith Ojala ALL I SEE IS RED oil on canvas 18in x 24in, 2018 Margo Geddes Standing Dead Silver Gelatin Print, 10in x 10in, 2022 ​ Margo Geddes left: Heart Boulder right: Black Ground Silver Gelatin Prints, 10in x 10in, 2022 "To live in the Pacific Northwest these days is to live with the pervasiveness of fire in its many guises–with the smoke that signals fire, over there; with the flames that signal fire, right now; and with the charred landscapes that si gnal fire, back then. Fire is present here, even when it is not." ​ Erin James read more on how the ubiquity of fire is explored in Ground Truths. Laura Ahola-Young Found Object 1, Cut, Burned ink and watercolor on board, 22in x 22in, 2023 Laura Ahola-Young Found Object 2, Cut, Burned ink and watercolor on board, 22in x 22in, 2023 Siri Stensberg From the Smoke, For the Birds video and audio. 2020 Julie Mortimer Crow Memories watercolor, 12in x 16in Asante Riverwind Waldo Wilderness and Mountain Bluebird acrylic on canvas, 8in x 10in Mary Vanek Smith​ Sky on Fire oil on canvas, 11in x 14in Justin Webb Skeletons of Soda Fire 2 silver gelatin print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 ​ Justin Webb Skeletons of Soda Fire 1 silver gelatin print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 Kate Lund Are You Sure We are Going the Right Way? cattle marker and graphite on panel, 3ft x 4ft, 2016 David Paul Bayles & Frederick J. Swanson from Typologies: Charred Abstractions series Laura Ahola-Young Mapping Oxygen mixed-media on board, 18in x 18in, 2021 Kate Lund Downdraft installation view & detail, cattle marker & graphite on paper, 5ft x 23ft, 2016 Enid Smith Becker Witness acrylic on canvas, 30in x 48in, 2018 Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes (FIPL): Overlook Field School various projects from five week workshop, 2021 "Being in the thick of things –or gra ppl ing wi th fire from within, as opposed to witnessing it from afar– is essential to understanding not only what fire is tod ay, but what it means to the various commu nities that live with it in our region." Erin James read more about Ground Truths artists with "boots on the ground ." Maggie Keefe West of Cabin RX watercolor Alice Keefe collage Maggie Keefe Upper Hatter RX watercolor Laura Ahola-Young Two Pines Down (after the Fire) graphite, Ink and watercolor on paper, 20in x 16in, 2023 David Paul Bayles & & Frederick J. Swanson Typology Series: Canopy Triptych David Paul Bayles & & Frederick J. Swanson Typology Series: Charred Abstraction Triptych David Paul Bayles & & Frederick J. Swanson Chronosequence Series: Photopoint FFR 2 views from Finn Rock Bridge looking down the McKenzie River to prow of an island with jam of wood floated into place before fire, 2020-23 David Paul Bayles & & Frederick J. Swanson Chronosequence Series: Photopoint FFR 17 views looking up the McKenzie River valley in a mixed hardwood and conifer forest on a terrace high above the river, 2020-22 Oregon Episcopal School & Sophia Hatzikos Lift, Coil, Zip retired wildfire hoses from Redmond, OR fire cache, steel, zip ties, 2022 Lift, Coil, Zip in progress, spring 2022 Laura Ahola-Young Lichenization 2 and the Marking of Fire mixed-media on paper, 18in x 12in, 2023 "Our region is full of wounds, of ruined shells in the forest that testify to fires that are too hot and too big. But these “wounds” are also openings... " Erin James read more about openings offered through Ground Truths artists. Sasha Michelle White The Containment (FIRST AID KIT FOR THE FIRE-PRONE) 2020-2021. Tinctures of Arnica, Balsam Root, Tall Oregon Grape and Yarrow. Silk, wool and cotton dyed with Blackberry, Ceanothus, St Johns Wort, Tall Oregon Grape, and Yarrow. Charcoal Powder. Burn Salve. Protocol poems and photographs. Megan Hatch almost there - losing ground archival pigment print, 10in x 27in, 2022 Jean Arnold Malden 8: Shreds ink and gouache on paper, 11in x 14in, 2022 Kate Lund Microburst wire fencing, rip-stop nylon, flannel, deer fencing, tent poles, 9ft x 9ft x 4ft, 2016 Megan Hatch the way isn't clear - and yet here we are archival pigment print, 27in x 10in, 2022 Jean Arnold Malden 1: After the Inferno acrylic on canvas, 20in x 26in, 2020 Jean Arnold Malden 5: Phase Change gouache on paper, 12in x 14in, 2022 Jean Arnold Malden 2: Gutted acrylic on canvas, 20in x 26in, 2022 Liz Toohey-Wiese Billboard installed outside of Vernon, BC from August 2020 - March 2021 further considerations "Ubiquitous Fire" A key theme of the art that features in the Ground Truths collection is the ubiquity of fire. To live in the Pacific Northwest these days is to live with the pervasiveness of fire in its many guises–with the smoke that signals fire, over there; with the flames that signal fire, right now; and with the charred landscapes that signal fire, back then. Fire is present here, even when it is not. As Meredith Ojala notes in her response to the call for submissions, her oil on canvas Seeing Red is one painting in a set “made at the time when wildfires felt all-encompassing, when the world felt like it was on fire.” Her experience of driving through and living in fires in Southern Idaho, Eastern Oregon, and Washington in the summer of 2018 was so sweeping that it defined the daily rhythms of her life. She fell asleep looking out at wildfire from her windows and was woken up by the sounds of water-bombers. Even her dreams turned red. She notes that wildfires took over many of her paintings, even when she “had no plans to incorporate them.” The ubiquity of fire looms large in the wild abstractness of Ojala’s painting: we are unsure if we are looking at flames, or wildfire scars, or red dreams. The image is both beautiful and terrifying. It, like fire, appears multiplicitous–expansive and unbound to any one meaning or experience. Indeed, the very everywhereness of fire in our region is one way of conceptualizing the diversity of vantage points and materials with which the Ground Truths artists come at the subject. Margo Geddes’ work, too, grapples with the all-presence of wildfire. She notes that “fire season has become ubiquitous during the summer months in Montana,” and her photographs are one way of processing the “swiftly changing” landscape as it moves through fire’s various phases. Geddes’ prints illustrate fire’s mercurial nature as well as the rich range of emotions that fire can produce. The starkness of Standing Dead evokes familiar narratives of fire’s capacious destructiveness–its ability to rip through a landscape, leaving only wounds behind. But the patient observer will notice life among the ruins; what initially appears as a luscious shadow of a tree in the photograph’s bottom right corner encourages the eye to recalibrate and open itself up to the trees that live and thrive amongst the char. This emotional movement, from that of scars to that of regeneration, repeats in her photo of the Heart Boulder. While driving through the Bitterroot National Forest, Geddes spotted granitic boulders previously hidden amongst forest foliage but now exposed by fire’s wake. By capturing this moment of legibility, before the boulders are hidden again by fireweed, Geddes’ work illuminates yet another version of fire–one of reveal, regeneration, and renewal. Ojala’s and Geddes’ descriptions of their artistic process suggests that one way to grapple with the ubiquity of fire is to drive through it, literally. This act of experiencing fire on the move, or moving with fire across space and time, is even more apparent in Siri Stensberg’s From the Smoke, For the Birds . Filmed while driving through a dust and smoke storm in Eastern Washington in early fall, 2020, Stensberg’s piece is a visual and auditory echo of the “Fable of Tomorrow” that opens Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring . The video, which at first appears peaceful, quickly becomes filled with what is missing: no birds perch on the telephone lines, and the reason for their absence becomes clear as audio of a voicemail from Stensberg’s grandmother tells us about birds dying of smoke inhalation after fleeing a fire. Stensberg explains that the video and layered vocals create space for viewers to “mourn the wildlife and ecosystems lost in forest fires of the Pacific Northwest.” Her piece also asks us to linger on the various ways, both immediately perceptible and not, that fire lingers in our lives. Two additional pieces similarly turn to the non-human to illuminate fire’s ubiquity. Julie Mortimer’s Crow Memories brings to life the ghostly presence that defines Stensberg’s video, demanding that we shift our perspective from human to bird to experience wildfire and its effects. The misty air that dominates public imaginations of the Pacific Northwest is present on the edges of Mortimer’s watercolor. But this moisture gives way to dirty smoke in the painting’s center, such that the titular crow must turn its head to breathe. Stensberg’s video asks us to live in a world in which the birds have fled, or died. Mortimer’s work, on the other hand, tasks us with inhabiting a moment of captivity during which the crow attempts–and perhaps fails–to find the air to escape. The crow, a powerful cultural symbol of both death and the future, is here caught between the two in a landscape that similarly hovers between one version of itself and another. If Mortimer’s crow is trapped in the moment of, Asante Riverwind’s bluebird thrives in the time after. Mountain Bluebird and Waldo Wilderness is inspired by Riverwind’s experience of the 1996 Wheeler Point Fire in Eastern and Central Oregon, which he himself fought to save structures and forest for five brutal days. Like the crow, Riverwind struggled to breathe the smoke and see through the air that enveloped him. But as a longtime resident of the area trained as a USFS sawyer and firefighter, he remained to experience the aftermath of the fire. As he explains, the bluebird is a “resilient species well adapted to fire ecology,” and his particular bluebird, thriving brightly amongst the snags and debris, reminds us that “life is truly resilient, as are we all.” His painting visually declares that blue skies, like bluebirds, are also part of the fire cycles of our region. Finally, Mary Vanek Smith’s painting provides us with yet another perspective of fire and its ubiquity–this time a highly emotional one. Sky on Fire takes, as its subject matter, the presence of active fire. But rather than menace or destruction, Smith’s oil painting evokes beauty and tranquility. Its brilliant orange imagery and symmetry foster a sense of calm, and the foregrounded fence suggests a certain safety from the wildness of Ojala’s red dreams. Indeed, the painting could easily be one of a stunning Western sunrise; as Smith explains, the painting’s “beautiful natural display” stands in for “hundreds of thousands of acres of forest being burned.” The painting thus cleverly captures the cognitive, emotional, and affective dissonance of finding beauty in terror, and locating a new tomorrow in the fires of today. Ubiquitous Fire Meredith Ojala ALL I SEE IS RED Margo Geddes Standing Dead Boots GTruth "Boots on the Ground" Boots on the ground: in many ways this is a clichéd phrase that, with its evocation of military action, brings to mind images of war, soldiers, defense, and attack. As such, it fits a popular narrative of fire in the twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest as an adversary that we must defeat–an evil presence escaping out of the woods that demands active fighting. The complete story of fire in our region is, of course, much more complicated: modern wildfire is both too hot and too fast, seeded as it is by decades of the fuel loading that has resulted from federal- and state-supported suppression policies, and a necessary part of the lifecycle of many of the region’s ecosystems. Having boots on the ground in our contemporary firescape is thus also much more complicated than the military connotations of the phrase suggest. As many of the contributions to Ground Truths attest, being in the thick of things–or grappling with fire from within, as opposed to witnessing it from afar–is essential to understanding not only what fire is today, but what it means to the various communities that live with it in our region. Kate Lund’s contributions to Ground Truths began when she was in fire: while studying as an art student, Lund spent eight summers working as a wildland firefighter with the United States Forest Service (USFS). As she explains, she used firefighting to “fuel” her artistic practice, collecting “images, objects, and sensations over the course of each summer in the landscape.” That collection is on vivid display in Are You Sure We are Going the Right Way , Downdraft and Microburst –gestural renderings and sculptures that not only evoke her experiences of fire operations but carry within them remnants of the urgency and distress of being in the field. Microburst, for example, makes use of expired and cast-off tents and outdoor firefighting equipment to conjure the way that wind moves during a fire. Fencing, nylon, and tent poles hang together to situate the viewer within the actual wildfire’s wind–“short, sharp bursts of air strong enough to mow down 200 foot-tall trees in a matter of seconds.” The work of David Paul Bayles and Frederick J. Swanson similarly originates in situ. A western Oregon photographer and a retired Research Geologist with the USFS’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, respectively, Bayles and Swanson have made dozens of site visits over two and a half years to the landscape blackened by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire to better understand wildfire and its effects on our region. As they eloquently explain, “seeking truth involves boots on the ground while looking for clues in the clouds,” as “that’s what trees do.” Bayles and Swanson use a variety of scientific and artistic methodologies to try on a tree’s perspective, working together to combine the photographer’s eye for form and color with the scientists’ focus on biological and physical processes. Their meditative treeness, or quiet on-the-groundness, is clear in the two styles of photographic work that feature in their Ground Truths contributions: Typologies (groups of images of single subjects) and Chronosequences (photographs that track change over time). “Truth may be lodged in the tread of our boots,” they note–a sentiment made visual in the rootedness with which we must observe the treetops in their Typologies: Canopy series and its observations of the forest’s resilience. The Keefe family shows us the intergenerational ramifications of fire field work. As their artist’s statement explains, the Keefes “study fire from a variety of disciplines and perspectives”: Rob as Director of the University of Idaho Experimental Forest (UIEF), Maggie as a watercolor painter, and their nine-year-old daughter Alice as a collager. Maggie’s paintings pull directly from Rob’s work in the UIEF, capturing the results of prescribed burns that prepare the site for regeneration and low-intensity fires that burn the understory to reduce grass and shrub fuels. The prescriptive titles of Upper Hatter Rx and West of Cabin Rx signal the tone and intent of these paintings; the Keefes explain that “prescribed fire is one of our most effective tools for reducing wildfire in the Pacific Northwest,” and these paintings “show the use of good fire in forests on the Palouse Range.” We see this “goodness easily in the latter painting, which depicts a fire manager walking calmly amongst a stand of healthy trees and signals the harmonious relationship of the prescribed burn and landscape via the fuzzy border between flame and grass. Alice also captures the “goodness” of prescribed burns in her collage–a bright and cheerful work that illustrates what this fire means “to her soul” as she remembers “seeing the flames for myself disappear as they burn down the pile.” Her collage, evoking the safe and the domestic in its doily base, offers us the same challenge as her mother’s paintings: what if we understood fire to be not “wild” and destructive, but peaceful and familiar? Finally, work from two field schools once again highlights the power of being boots on the ground. Members of the Overlook Field School , funded by the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, spent five weeks in the summer of 2021 visiting post-fire sites in the Willamette National Forest, most of which had burned within the past thirty years. Their focus was on “recovery,” which they explain as “analogous to resilience, restoration, and regeneration . . . a return to a previous state–perhaps a new normal.” The temporary landscape installations recorded in their Recovery booklet track not only these forest explorations but also the exceptional conditions of their field work, including the record heat wave of their first day of field school and the wildfires that dominated the final design stage. Their work is thus triply-site-specific, in that it studies wildfire in place, takes inspiration from the environment in which it is produced, and demands that exhibit visitors, too, inhabit this specific location. Similarly, the collaboration between Sophia Hatzikos and the students of the Oregon Episcopal School enrolled in the I.M.P.A.C.T. (innovate/make/act/collaborate/tinker) course activates situated public art to generate new knowledge about climate change and the wildland firefighting industry. Inspired by site visits to the Lake Oswego Gallery without Walls, particularly the nearby tall trees and the next door firehouse, the students repurposed fire hoses originally used in wildfire suppression during 2020 and 2021, now destined for the landfill, to create Lift, Coil, Zip . The three hose towers, which cleverly summon visual and formal connections to tree rings and silver birches, intertangle contemporary forests in the Pacific Northwest and the fire suppression efforts that have created and maintained them. They ask: how much does our experience of the region’s forests rely upon the wildfire-fighting industry and its policies of suppression? Where does hose end and tree begin? And what might the landscape look like in the absence of either? Oregon Episcopal School Lift, Coil, Zip in progress​ Bayles & Swanson Chronosequences Series: Photopoint FFR 2 ​ wound openings "The Wound is an Opening" Enid Smith Becker Witness When I look at Enid Smith-Becker’s Witness , I initially see a scene of devastation. Columns of red interrupt an otherwise peaceful scene in the forest, burning upwards as they lay waste to the trees and understory. The stark vertical lines of flames literally chop the image up into before and after, or, rather, what once was/is and what will be. But, the longer that I look at this painting, the more diplopic, or double-sighted, it becomes. A second scene emerges, in which the columns of fire are not incinerating trees, but held within them. This interpretation foregrounds the idea of serotiny, a term associated with cone-bearing trees such as many species of pine, spruce, and sequoia that depend upon a blast of heat to trigger the release of their seeds. The longer that I look at Witness, the more clearly that I see two fires: one angry and devastating and another the first step in regeneration. I also see two sets of trees, respectively: one in the moment of collapse and another brimming with energy, potential, and life. The double-nature of Witness brings to life for me a line in the poem that accompanies Sasha Michelle White’s The Containment : “the wound is an opening.” The wound in the poem refers to delivery mechanisms in and of the body by which we can receive treatment and begin to heal. But it also strikes me as a powerful prescription for understanding the fire-prone and -affected landscapes of the twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest, or appreciating the two sets of trees that we see in Witness. Our region is full of wounds, of ruined shells in the forest that testify to fires that are too hot and too big. But these “wounds” are also openings of various kinds. Some of these openings are literal, in that many plants in our region need fire to open up to survive and thrive. Still other openings are figurative, in that they assert alternative burning practices and fire regimes that understand and use fire as a tool of life rather than one of only violence and annihilation. (Hence, also, the refrain that runs through White’s poem: “whose lands are you on?” ) Her work encourages us to think of not only the burn, but also the salve that follows. Several contributors to Ground Truths emphasize the violence of today’s wildfires and the wounds they cause. See, for example, Justin Webb’s photographs of the aftermath of the 2015 Soda Fire. The two trees that dominate Skeletons of Soda Fire 1 and 2 remain, six years after the event, as evidence of what we have lost. As Webb writes in his contributor’s note, his photographs are inspired by the experience of “seeing a landscape that I grew up exploring stripped of its already limited plant life.” The stark black and whiteness of Webb’s arboreal photos revise Ansel Adams’ iconic images of National Parks for the Pyrocene era. Webb swaps Adams’ wild and abundant sublime for the sublime of what is now absent and the wrecks that remain. See, too, the trees that similarly haunt the backgrounds of Jean Arnold’s paintings of what is left in Malden, Washington. In September 2020, the Babb Road Fire burned 15,000 acres and over two hundred buildings–including 67 homes–in a few hours. The five paintings in Arnold’s Malden series foreground this domestic devastation, documenting the exposed interiors of shattered houses with brutal clarity. Yet is the background that haunts me most in these images. Behind each set of ruins stands a set of trees that signals just how far the loss stretches. The trees in Malden 8: Shreds and Malden 5: Phase Change , in particular, remind me that it is not only our homes that are disappearing, but the homes (and lives) of countless other species with which we share this region. The ghost of what once also lingers in Liz Toohey-Wise’s striking Billboard , which anticipated the White Rock Lake Fire in 2022. Be quick, the billboard says to us with its tongue in its cheek; see this landscape while you can, as it won’t be here long. ​ Other contributions to Ground Truths function at a different scale of time or engage alternative cultural practices to help us see wounds as the first step in healing and, often, a necessary phase in life. This perspective is perhaps loudest in the powders, salves, and tinctures of White’s The Containment –part of her larger project FIRST-AID KIT FOR THE FIRE-PRONE . Featuring medicines and dyes she made from fire-adapted plants of the southern Willamette Valley and The Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve such as arnica, snowbrush ceanothus, and St John’s wort, White’s kit draws our attention how we might use plants that thrive with the recurring disturbance of fire to treat the illnesses and injuries that fire can cause. As she explains, her kit emphasizes “fire, tending, and healing,” particularly those central to Indigenous fire regimes that are not based solely on suppression, to present us a ground truth that “promotes a pro-active, cross-cultural attending to our fire-prone landscapes.” Justin Webb Skeletons of Soda Fire 2 Jean Arnold Malden 8: Shreds Megan Hatch almost there - losing ground The work of Megan Hatch is similarly interested in healing and renewal. A queer, multidisciplinary artist from Portland, Hatch began her project in the summer of 2020 and took inspiration from the interconnections between George Floyd’s murder, the COVID-19 pandemic, and what was, at the time, Oregon’s worst-ever wildfire season. Her photographs potently insist that we grapple with what is broken and how we might mend it, and each diptych tasks us with viewing, simultaneously, images of death and images of life. A thin golden line inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, by which broken pottery is mended with gold, yokes together each pair of images. Hatch explains that kintsugi vessels “hold our hurt and our hope,” and, similarly, her images tell us that “there is healing to be found in holding multiple truths in our awareness at the same time.” I see this hurt and hope strongly almost there – losing ground, which binds together an enticing forest path with stark snags. Which came first, the photographs ask: the life or the death? Can we truly have one without the other? And what binds them together? Several years ago, when I started to study literary representations of fire, I had a conversation with a fire ecologist friend about the evolution of fire regimes in my current home state of Idaho. She told me that prior to 1900, fires annually burned at least two million acres in the state. These fires had a different texture to the big, hot fires that we see today, she explained; the historical fires burned mostly lower elevation forests and rangelands, were smaller and more numerous, and largely were ignited by lightning or indigenous fire practices. I was surprised to learn that post-Big Burn federal suppression policies have produced a fire deficit–my friend told me that we actually need more fire in our region, just fire of a different kind. She was very clear on this issue: no fire is not the answer, and we must learn to see fire not as bad but part of the land’s personality. Laura Aloha-Young’s work and artistic process crisply captures the swirl of emotions that followed this conversation. Attempting to “provide evidence of the intricacies of regeneration, of life in the forest,” her pieces begin with photos that she takes of fire landscapes that “reveal the marks of fire itself: lichen, mycology, growth, decay.” I clearly see the tension between growth and decay in her work and the ways that it mixes media and species to grapple with the emotional complexity of fire. Much like Becker-Smith’s Witness , I initially see a scene of devastation when I look at Two Pines Down (after the fire) --the dark colors and jagged lines return me to the melancholy of Webb’s skeletons, and the hazy shapes that surround the lines heighten the ghostliness of the image. But when I look again, I see that these hazy shapes are alive. They are not ghosts of what we have lost, but fungal and vegetal assemblages in the process of emergence. The image is thus one of simultaneous wound and opening, past and future. Its depiction of post-fire blossoming–and the revelation of this meaning as late-maturing, like serotiny–reminds us that our relationship with fire must be complicated and double-sighted. It also promises that in our search of the material evidence that remains after the flames burn out, and the layers of meaning that we find there, we may access a new ground truth of acceptance, regrowth, and fortitude. further considerations contributed by Confluence Lab member Erin James, April 2023. Laura Ahola-Young Two Pines Down (after the Fire) Next