For a year or more now, I contemplated Fire. It happened after listening to the audio book: “Fire Weather. The making of a Beast”, by John Vaillant. The book was narrated by Alan Carlson and was a #1 bestseller and winner of the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing and numerous other awards. (Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction; winner of the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize; finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers ‘Trust prize for nonfiction; Finalist for the National Book award in nonfiction; one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year; shortlisted for the 20204 Hubert Evens Non-fiction Prize and Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in non-Fiction.)
This book gives a riveting account of the monstruous wildfire at Fort McMurry in 2016, and a panoramic exploration of the changing relationship between fire and humankind.
Listening to this book, I became fascinated by the huge impact of Fire on Humanity and what it means in, not only physical terms of losing everything, but emotional and spiritual and even symbolically.
There were many serious wildfires occurring all over the world, after my experience with this book, that kept on stirring my being.
I started embroidering and painting parts of what I felt and eventually sewed them together. The first attempt melted under the iron, and I thought the judges of the SAQA call for entry to the Primal Forces of Fire will not accept it! Then I made a second attempt to demonstrate my primary theme of how I feel fire affect us.
This is what I came up with, but it was not accepted in the SAQA call.
These pieces describe the necessary annihilation that precedes a complete transformation. The kind of destruction must reach to the bone – therefore the skeletons. You can see the burning and ruins of buildings in the background while the fire and smoke still eat its way through everything it comes across. The trees have already been absorbed to ash. Then with amazement the phoenix appears that soars from these aches.
In hindsight I should have entered both pieces because I only entered the second one and not the one that was melted. The melted one is coincidently such a metaphor of the overall concept.
What do you think?
Jayni
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