Amory Abbott and Liz Toohey-Wiese’s ‘Fire Season 3’ Garners Recognition for Evolving Exploration of Wildfire
Andreas Rutkauskas, Silent Witness (series), 2024. Inkjet print mounted on dibond. (Image courtesy Fire Season).
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The latest volume in the ongoing series casts an ever-widening lens on the myriad impacts of one of the 21st century’s most urgent climate phenomena.
An ongoing collaborative project exploring the global phenomenon of wildfires continues to grow in scope and recognition with the release of its third edition.
Led by artists Liz Toohey-Wiese (BFA 2011) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) faculty member Amory Abbott, Fire Season collects the voices of artists, academics, writers, wildland fighters, Indigenous community members, forestry workers, policy experts and activists into a biannual compendium of creative responses to the increasingly common climate event.
“Quite often, we try to understand wildfire through numbers, statistics and scientific processes,” says Liz, who is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.. “But it’s necessary that science holds the world at a distance to maintain objectivity. You have to take the personal out of it. Whereas art does something different — it holds the world incredibly close. It looks at things closely and accounts for personal experience.”
Kerri Flannigan, So, How Would You Define Fire?, 2024. Digital comic. (Image courtesy Fire Season)
Centered around a physical book, Fire Season draws in contributions from dozens of participants across media and practices. While each edition grows in ambition, Amory says neither he nor Liz planned for the project’s rapid expansion.
2020’s Fire Season 1, which included roughly 35 participants, focused mainly on responses to wildfire in the Pacific Northwest. Word spread “organically,” with submissions for the second edition rolling in from across North America, Africa and Europe. 2024’s Fire Season 3 is the largest edition yet, with 60 contributors offering perspectives from diverse professions in countries around the world.
Meanwhile, Fire Season was recently featured in articles by Preview and the Globe and Mail, with the Globe including the current Fire Season exhibition at the University of Victoria’s Legacy Gallery in its Climate Newsletter.
Erin Ashenhurst, It’s Nothing, 2024. Digital photograph. (Image courtesy Fire Season)
This unintended reach opened Liz and Amory’s eyes to how deeply wildfire impacts every part of life in every corner of the planet.
“It feels so important right now; the relevancy of these discussions just keeps growing,” Amory says. “It’s so meaningful to see it reaching beyond art practice, beyond publication, beyond politics or conversations around climate. All those discussions are there, but it seems like the sum is greater than its parts, and that feels good.”
According to Liz, ensuring these discussions are accessible and inclusive has been a priority from the outset.
“Something that’s always been important to me is that a logger could pick up the book and not feel alienated,” she says. “Even just in BC, there is a stark urban/rural divide on a lot of these issues. We want the myriad voices in the book to produce a form of communal understanding that holds up people’s experiences, for all their contradictions and complications. Maintaining that complexity has always felt crucial.”
The range of topics the book covers has also grown, with Fire Season 3 including numerous entries on so-called “good fire” practices such as prescribed fire and cultural burning.
Liz Toohey-Wiese, Forced Into a Great and Difficult Transformation, 2024. Handmade sign. (Image courtesy Fire Season)
Amory adds that Fire Season’s gallery exhibitions and public forums offer further opportunities to expand on the book’s offerings. Comics become animatics; films can be shown in their entirety; and people from all walks of life can gather to discuss the countless ways wildfires can shape an ecology, community or individual person.
“As we’ve gotten more focused with the project over the years, Liz and I have tried hard to create a space for people to talk about what are often contradictory experiences,” Amory says. “I don’t think there’s an underlying message in the books other than we’re all getting through this, and it’s better when we do that together and learn from each other as we go.”
Fire Season 3 will be available for purchase online in late summer, 2024. Copies will also be available at READ Books at ECU. Fire Season 1 and Fire Season 2 are currently available for purchase online or at READ Books.
Follow Fire Season on Instagram to keep up with the latest news including public events and previews of artwork in upcoming volumes.
Visit ECU online to learn more about studying Visual Arts at Emily Carr.
