"Prairiefire"

In a personal journey that uses visual language, gesture, chance and space, Prairiefire reinvents images of the Kansas prairie during prescribed burns. These planned events occur in the spring every year in the Tallgrass Prairie a bit west of where I have lived all of my life. In feeling that the world was on the edge of destruction, studying this form of land management became my way to make sense of precarity. When I learned about the “indigenous knowledges” of the native tribes that used planned burns as a way to exist with nature rather than in opposition to it, this series expanded in hopeful meaning. The stories of their deliberate control of the smaller burning to avoid massive destruction gave me solace.

Each of my images contains the threat of danger with suggestions of heat and flame, but the idea of survival through stoic determination and planned avoidance is also present. My work attempts to create, reenact, and revive images that become metaphors for a hopeful way of life, and to become a unique expression of fragility, vulnerability, and determination.