DISPATCHES

NOTES FROM A MOVING FIRE

‘SURVIVAL IS’

11x17 inches

advocating for an ethos
of creative response-ability

JUNE 2023

︎

on fire and chronic illness

in the forest, it’s 8am. i am standing with my coffee in a grove of jeffrey pines whose trunks are ringed in lichen of a spectacular lime green. a hundred yards off,the morning’s traffic moves into tahoe city.

like a thing moving tentatively from its hiding place, i feel out the fissures and tears that run along the torn edges where ambition once sewed optimism inside me. being back in this forest has me thinking about this very project, which has lived inside me for several years, the most recent of which lead me through an unexpected landscape of choronic illness and the half-life of recovery. i am reckoning with lost things. i am a different body: i know how fire can devastate an internal landscape. my body remembers the winter where nothing grew. my body who knows the mess of miscarriage and incompleteness; grasping. walking now throuogh the forest, my body sees in a hundred layers how devastation rests in the cycle of all things. without it, we grow heavy and thick and dry. self-preservation entices combustion. i am a mother bearing marks of invisible flames. how do i move like the tiny flowers who come forth knowing only the way toward sunlight?

JUNE 2023

︎

︎LAKE TAHOE,
CALIFORNIA

semiotics of forest management

whose language marks the trees?

JUNE 2023

︎

︎TAHOE NAT’L FOREST, CALIFORNIA

walking the fire road

my mind said, doubt

the orange flowers said, nothing goes away

MAY 2023

︎

︎EAST BAY HILLS, CALIFORNIA

the fire inside

mauna loa is erupting. the night before hawaiian independence day (nov 28th), the flow began. lava snakes down the side of the black mountain as helicopters hover above.

on the island of kauai where my partner and i have been living, the volcano is dramatically eroding, carving finger-thin ridges of green from its slopes and decomposing into iron-red hills that sprout climbing jungles; a thousand miles of green. here on the big island, the volcano creates new earth below our feet. to be in humble relationship with hawaii is to see how much of the earth is volcanic. for hawaiians, the agent of all life - she who warmed geothermal vents in the sea - is the fire goddess Pele.

NOV 2022

🌋

︎BIG ISLAND, HAWAII

drawing with charcoal created by the Jones Fire

JULY 2021

⚫️

︎GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

charcoal triptych

ran through the trees
and found a mine
shelves of earth and rust-wrought cars

which cued a dream from a few days earlier, of trucks without brakes, beds laden with powdered rock, careening down a carved-out mountain through an earth-churning wheel that never stopped...

and a tower whose foundations are air, and not rock
and beyond that, a forest burned
symbols on the trees
this land of scarred surfaces

am i dreaming you
or are you dreaming me?

OCT 2020

🔥️

︎CAZADERO, CALIFORNIA

‘smoke ceiling’

shot on a fire road in the east bay hills on the day the bay area turned orange

︎ click to watch

SEPT 2020

🔥️

︎EAST BAY HILLS, CALIFORNIA

‘fire in paradise’

analog + digital collage⁣⁣ print
11x17 inches

I created think piece after walking the still soot-black streets of Paradise, CA⁣ in november⁣ 2019

the first run of this print raised funds for the Bear Yuba Land Trust to support re-building the Independence Trail, the first-ever wheelchair-accessible wilderness trail and a beloved running trail of mine. a large section of the trail’s wooden flume walkways was destroyed in the Jones fire in August 2020

︎ click to purchase this print on my website

AUGUST 2020

︎

︎NEVADA CITY, CALIFORNIA

every fire is a new fire 🔥

in the rainy beginning months of the pandemic, I spent many evenings making charcoal in the backyard I shared with my best friend and my partner. to do this, i filled metal tins I had found at a local thrift store with branches of willow and manzanita and pine, making beds for the tins amongst the embers.

I was turning the charcoal into paint to paint with for my thesis project, LISTENING IN VOID SPACE: http://listening-in-void.space/

every fire is a new fire. no fire is the same.

SPRING 2020

⚫️

︎GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

it feels like fire a poem

1

this is a landscape painting.

it started with the sun.
strange sun, smoke sky.
fluorescent orb,
color like coral
but burning.

omen of california:
coast, mountains, canyons, sky.

the west, up in flames:
and above us from the space station,
an astronaut tweeted
“stay safe, my friends,
SURVIVE.”

2

i don’t know why I love that color.
why it takes an emergency
to turn me on.
how the color used to mark trees worth felling
is the same
as the sun in a smoke-throat sky.

PANTONE 17-1462
Label: “Flame.”
the artificial eats attention.
we made a color
that would not die.

3

in my dreams those days i saw a woman
with a snake around her neck.
below her,
a black X,
though the X was missing a line.

and we had drawn
too many:
roads through the forest
forest fat
and heavy
and dripping
and dry.

No Trespassing.
fire/
break
but—
we would not lose
our green grass
our
blue sky.

4

the aztec god of snake and fire
is also god of letting blood.
i draw a circle
to describe
my woman body,
but it is hard to name a thing that is / will / has died.

now
fear sits coiled, waiting
for flames to arrive
late at night.
red lip cresting our
mountains,
ash galaxies,
red-orange
skies.

5

as I child,
i was scared of
losing what i loved.

growing older,
i have learned
the thrill of it:
pain/pleasure and
how the body burns things
to survive.

AUGUST 2018

︎SAGEHEN EXPERIMENTAL FOREST STATION, TRUCKEE CA

an ongoing project by kelly sinclair vicars