Marshall

The Marshall Fire — Colorado's most destructive wildfire — erupted across the highway from my home on a day of near-hurricane-force winds. I can see where it started from my roof. My house survived; more than a thousand others did not. Two people died and over 1,000 pets perished. The landscape still carries visible scars, and some neighbors are only now finishing the arduous work of rebuilding, five years later. Since living in my neighborhood I have been evacuated from my home three times — once for flood, twice for fire. Now, whenever the wind rises, I feel the particular unease of someone who lives inside an unpredictable and changed climate. This body of work is my attempt to hold that experience — not to document it cleanly, but to let the materials carry what words and images alone cannot. I collect bones from the land around my home and apply cyanotype chemistry, exposing them with lace and other patterns that are open to interpretation but reference memory and protection. The resulting prints and objects bind together what remains with what vanishes: bone as archive of the living, cyanotype as a chemistry that depends on changing light, lace as the fragile architecture of memory and shelter. My chemigram drawings, influenced by the forms of those same bones, work at the threshold between control and accident — each one a negotiation between my hand and the variable logic of the darkroom chemistry. The Anthropocene presents itself as an age of human mastery. What I know from living inside it is something more ambivalent: an era of profound loss that demands we learn new kinds of resilience — emotional, structural, and otherwise. Analog processes suit this inquiry because they resist the illusion of perfect control. Light, chemistry, time, and chance are collaborators. Imperfection is evidence of this wobbling dance. For this submission I am presenting my chemigram work and cyanotype bone pieces. A larger exhibition in development will include digital photographs and short documentary films made with residents of Marshall and the surrounding area.