Memories of Future Fires
2022
Forest fires; smoke inhalation; microplastics in our ecosystems, blood, and lungs; loss of homes past and future. I interweave petrochemical-derived materials, plant materials, and landscape imagery to draw connections between climate crisis, fossil fuel extraction, and the buildup of toxic plastics in the earth, water, and our bodies. The hand-woven pieces in “Memories of Future Fires” each start with photos I took in a fire-scarred landscape in the Pacific Northwest. I reduce the trees in these landscapes down to their fundamental shapes before rematerializing them with petrochemical-derived monofilament. As I look to connections between the life-sustaining circulatory systems that are both internal and external to the human body, the abstracted tree forms also begin to evoke hearts and lungs.
This project was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Read more about the research informing and informed by this project in the article “Breath Plastic,” published in Feral Fabric Journal and adapted from a talk presented at Praxis & Practice Digital Weaving Conference in in 2023
