Cultivating Fire

Fire is a nurturer of ecosystems and cultures. It is an essential element of all life. For millennia, the raw nature of fire shaped the ecology of western North America and the original cultures that inhabited it. Paradoxically, as fire shaped and then settled culture in this region, people began to push it away. Yet, fire has not lost its importance to the landscape or to the humans that occupy it. When cultivated rather than exiled from our hearths, fields and forests, fire can be a benevolent partner.

Driven to the Sierra de la Laguna as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar to investigate the way fire operates in the southern most pine-oak forest in the California mountain chain, I was seeking new aesthetic solutions to the dire situation facing similar forests in the western United States. What I found was that in the Sierra de la Laguna the people have not lost their connection to the land, nor have they lost their connection to fire. Matriarchs of ranching families cook over open fire in their kitchens and the ranchers who travel through the backcountry of the Sierra de la Laguna cook over campfires alongside the trails. Wildfire, contained by “brechas”, nourishes the ecosystem like cook fires nourish the community who inhabits it. The ranching community of the Sierra de la Laguna truly operates as “keeper of the flames.”

With a new perspective on fire gained through time in the Sierra de la Laguna, this body of work highlights “good” fire in all its forms, from small-scale cook fires to prescribed burns and fire-treatments conducted on large-scales. The work in this exhibition attempts to evoke empathy for fire and the duality of its forces. Because, with empathy comes understanding. With understanding comes humility. With humility, perhaps we can take up the role of apprentice once again to the great teacher that is Nature and learn to embrace fire as partner for forests in need of healing.