Throughout the early spring, a burn team develops prescriptions for tracts of land owned by conservation authorities for the purposes of restoration and propagation of native species. While each fire has its own specific environmental goals, the dramatic beauty of the human-led disruption of invasive flora is a concrete endeavour of systematic and ongoing restoration.
Depicted are boundaries of space between the viewer and the landscape, and the boundaries of heat and fuel, and of time. Flames rise up in seconds, soon disappearing, and the ashes lay on the land for what comes. While capturing attempts of conservation, these pictures also recognize the attempts of photography to convey a cautious optimism, one future of colonialism and the relationship required to create a visual history of the new landscape returning to some semblance of the old. Where barriers have been built for centuries, a landscape is opened for repair and stewardship to accompany the voices reconciling the collective notion of land.
