Fire Season book series looks at wildfires through artistic lenses

More than 60 contributors from various fields reflected on the topic of wildfires through their own perspectives for the third edition of a book series exploring its impacts.

The Fire Season book project, led by Kwantlen Polytechnic University fine arts instructor Liz Toohey-Wiese and fellow artist Amory Abbott, includes artwork and writing from artists, firefighters, writers, academics, and members of Indigenous communities. 

“We call the books a form of collective sense-making and want to have lots of different voices in the book simultaneously,” Toohey-Wiese says.

Unlike science, which requires objectivity and provides information in facts and numbers, Toohey-Wiese says the book series is an outlet for people to express their feelings and share experiences about the environment and climate change in a creative way.

“A number of wildfire fighters have submitted [works] to our books before …. I think that job is so intense and hands on that there wouldn’t be a place for them to share those sorts of things.”

Toohey-Wiese contributed a photo she took of the remnants of a wildfire that burned along the B.C.-Yukon border for the latest edition of Fire Season.

“I was driving through this wildfire burn … [and it] was the biggest wildfire burn I had ever seen,” Toohey-Wiese says.

The photo is of a sign she installed at the devastated scene of the fire with the quote “forced into a great and difficult transformation.” The line comes from a lecture on Buddhist philosophy Toohey-Wiese listened to while driving to the Yukon’s Dawson City for an artist residency, she says.

The photo received more than 40,000 likes after she posted it on Instagram, Toohey-Wiese adds.

“I think it was interesting to see how that piece really resonated with people both through the context of the climate crisis and wildfires, but people were [also] making a lot of connections with that work in their own personal lives as well.”

KPU Wilson School of Design instructor Erin Ashenhurst became interested in the project after finding out about it through resources shared by KPU’s Climate+ Challenge, which led her to order the second volume in print. 

Later on, she contributed digital images from a series called It’s Nothing after finding out the project was seeking submissions for the third volume. 

“At first glance, these images depict a coherent snapshot of children at leisure in environments where fire has been normalized,” Ashenhurst wrote in an email statement to The Runner.

“Upon closer consideration, these images reveal themselves to be composite spaces mixing family photos from road trips in British Columbia — including those taken from the highway following the fire that consumed the Village of Lytton in 2021.”

Ashenhurst wrote that people started to normalize the risk of wildfires to manage their feelings of dread, which is something the images in her series play with.

“We were driving through Williams Lake one summer and the server at the restaurant mentioned how her family had been evacuated from their home a few years prior when the fire came too close,” Ashenhurst wrote.

“She’d been a teenager at the time and understandably terrified. It was an off-hand comment but delivered with an intensity that made me imagine the scene.”

Toohey-Wiese says the best things about the book series is the sense of community it’s created, the opportunity for artists to collaborate with each other, and people resonating with topics about climate change.

“My hope is that people are able to connect with themselves in the ways they are experiencing these changes through reading these essays, poems, or looking at photographs or paintings.”

For more information about Fire Season, visit www.fireseason.org.