Sacrificial Bonfire

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.”
     Wallace Stevens, Credences of Summer

I recently reviewed another photographer’s body of work, a series of images of different people of different ages and settings each burning a possession; baby shoes, a dress, letters, a photograph. Surprisingly, my fellow reviewers were confused. “Why are they burning things?”

For me, setting fire to these personal items needed no more explanation. The viewer is left to come to their own conclusions of what the personal story might have been, but fire is a means of cleansing the heart. I’m not talking about just your standard issue boyfriend bonfire either. It is a sacrifice of the past in order to move forward. Creative destruction. If we seek a purification of the body with water, clear the mind with fresh air, and recharge the soul by working with the earth, why not purify our hearts with fire? There is something very good and basic about burning away the pain and shit and weeds that weigh down the heart in order to start again with a clean slate.

And true, fire is more than this. It is a destroyer and it is transformation. It is passion and warmth. But fire as an element of purification is a good place to start when thinking about the symbolism of fire, of burning. As I (carefully) set small fires in my apartment to photograph, I began to consider why I think of fire as such a lovely thing, an object of respect and fascination. It gives me a mental starting point when I move to larger fires outside later in the year.

Sometimes it bears looking at an thing in a new way in order to make better sense of it in its natural state and to see without jadedness. With that in mind, and lately obsessed with whiteness of space, I turned the fire inside out…