Abstract
Finding Fire’s Form applies what I call the “analytics of the artist”—an attentiveness to color, substance, and form through manual and material practices—to ask what fire creates. Simultaneously creative investigation and scholarly endeavor, Finding Fire’s Form exists in a space somewhere between art and science, pertaining of both and resting wholly in neither. It ranges with fire across a fire-prone landscape that does not obey disciplinary boundaries to hold open the complex questions of what has brought us to a place of recurring catastrophic fire. It recognizes fire as simultaneously ecological, social, and cultural, and proposes that color, substance, and form are not simply tools of the artist by which to represent a fire-prone landscape but an essential means by which to expand our ways of knowing fire. Finding Fire’s Form engages with three fire-adapted shrubs native to the Pacific Northwest through the manual practices of drawing, dyeing, stitching, and burning. It grounds itself in Oregon’s 2021 Bootleg Fire and in an early scientific knowledge practice known as “excogitation.” The primary results of Finding Fire’s Form are incipient, material, and relational; they lean both into the creative and into the systematically experimental. Many of these ongoing material works will be/were displayed in a public exhibition of the same title as an integral component of my dissertation project; others have returned to the fire-prone landscape. This document represents a necessarily “fragmentous” but salient record of the practice and the process of finding fire’s dynamic and manifold forms.