Words about fire

Fire is both destruction and preservation, an elemental force that resists containment yet leaves its trace. Fire is a material event. Fire is a method of mark-making, a way to engage with time, transformation, and the fragility of matter. Fire is a paradox that both erases and extends the lifespan of living things. To burn is to intervene. A pencil writes on paper, and fire inscribes wood, embedding its own history of heat, touch, and change. The blackened surfaces of burned wood exist in a suspended state—neither fully consumed nor fully intact. The char functions as a landscape—textured, fractured, irreversibly altered. Fire serves as both gesture and record, an imprint of past action and an ongoing presence. Fire is ephemeral. A flame cannot be held, but the aftermath of the flame remains. Did the moment slip away, or is it saved in ash? This tension between presence and absence is what makes fire a radical medium. It does not allow return, only transformation. To engage with fire is to engage with entropy, with the inevitability of change. It is to work with time itself, understanding that what is burned is lost while also being made into something new. Standing at the edge of material and time, I watch as form breaks and reconstructs. Something once solid turns to ash. Something transient becomes mark, memory, and landscape. Fire is not just an end—it is a beginning.

A memory that doesn’t stand still

I stand at the edge of a meadow, dawn light spilling across the tall grass. I’ve been here many times before, trying to capture something that always slips just out of view. It’s not that I’m after a photograph, exactly, though I often bring a camera. What I want is more elusive. Some fusion of light, place, and memory that resists cataloging. I know that I’m chasing an illusion.

Throughout my life, I’ve collected fragments. Shells from the beach, scorched pinecones from a forest floor, notes scribbled on the backs of tickets and receipts. Each object feels like it contains a small universe that I lived in for a moment. For a while, I pretend these trinkets are enough to hold the moment in place, preserving it. Yet, in the half-light of a late afternoon, I notice the cracks in glass jars, the browning edges of paper. Each piece quietly confesses that even the best-curated archive can’t prevent the steady seep of time.

I think often of the interplay between order and entropy. There’s something reassuring about placing items in rows, labeling them, imposing structure onto a chaotic world. But I’ve watched a blazing fire devour an entire hillside, turning a once-lush forest into heaps of char and ash. No matter how I try to sort, record, or preserve, the natural processes—fire, decay, rust, rot—keep going. The tension between wanting to hold still what is inherently in motion feels like the heartbeat behind every act of archiving.

I am now in my studio and lay out some photographs. A deer bounding through tangled undergrowth, a single cloud hovering in the blue sky, the broken trunk of an tree. I have multiple copies of each, not because I’m indecisive, but because duplication soothes the fear of losing them. Yet I notice the subtle differences. One print is more faded, another shows a slight scratch or a misaligned color cast. There’s a strange kind of honesty. Maybe it is an acknowledgment that even when we replicate an image, time continues its work, wearing away the ink, warping the paper. Our attempts at permanence remain as fragile as the moments they depict.

When I hike back to that meadow a week later, the grass is taller, the wildflowers more brilliant. A thunderstorm has swept through, and the soil is dark and damp. If I photograph this place again, I know it won’t match the pictures I’ve already made. Something essential has changed. My footsteps sink deeper and the scent in the air is earthier. The moment is different not just because the meadow itself has changed, but because I have, too.

I realize then, in that moment, that my longing to preserve is tangled up in grief and wonder. I crave to fix time because living in constant flux can feel overwhelming. Maybe its another way to live with the anxiety I have. But the deeper gift in perseverance is in engagement—allowing ourselves to be shaped by transience rather than defeated by it. If an archive has any real value, maybe it’s in how it reminds us that every moment is in conversation with every other. A continuous story, never fully written, always evolving. And perhaps that’s what makes it all feel so alive.

Academic Research Papers:

Maple Sugaring: An Archaeological Past and a Multitudinous Present

Work, Place, and Art: Broadening the Environmental Discourse