WILDFIRES: POINTS OF ORIGIN (2020)
Every year, as the West becomes hotter and drier, more and larger wildfires have torn across my state. We track the details, trajectory and magnitude of each burn, watch the video footage, calculate our vulnerability, close our windows, put on masks and review our escape plans. For many of us, wildfires have become a source of angst and dread, an awesome reminder of our powerlessness and the fragility of our safety.
I have become preoccupied by the particularity of each fire’s origin story. A hunter’s illicit campfire, exploding electrical equipment, sparks from a car tire blowout, wind-whipped electrical wires at the edge of a line of trees. Happenstance aligns with the weather, the heat, corporate neglect and the terrain, transforming the landscape into a terrifying firestorm, generating chaos, misery and overwhelming loss.
These collages are an attempt to capture the moment when these firestorms begin. I identified the geographic origin points of eight major fires that occurred in California between 2013 and 2019 through media reports and CAL FIRE briefings. I pinpointed those locations as closely as possible on the appropriate USGS topographic map quadrangles and created relief maps of each area using strips of torn paper in graduated heights to mirror the contour lines of each fire’s initial location. I tinted and splashed the edges of the paper to mark each fire’s ignition point and to suggest scorched terrain.
Each collage covers only a few acres, a sliver of land compared to the total area burned by the resulting fires (a combined total of over 1,165,000 acres, or 1,820 square miles). For me, these works speak to the enormous consequences of seemingly random events and offer a metaphor for the speed and ferocity with which the micro can become macro.