The Memory of Nature
"Fire for me is the future without forgetting the past. It is the memory of nature. ... [Fire] is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse."
– Yves Klein, Lecture at The Sorbonne, 1959
My Annals of the Former World project is my testimony to the wonder of the natural world as we found it, and serves as my record of this world for my own daughter and future generations, both what we had and what we lost, an elegy for a world that will never be the same.
In the newest part of this project, entitled The Memory of Nature, I photograph landscapes threatened by climate change and then burn prints of these photographs, creating an entirely new work scarred by the effects of fire, the funeral pyre of the the Anthropocene. Fire was the critical tool in the creation of our current civilization, and its unfettered use will perhaps be its downfall.
