I like to listen to the radio as I work and in early 2024 I began to notice a new lexicon showing up in the regular news reports that pepper my favourite shows. Phrases such as “wildfire season,” “monster wildfire” and “evacuation alerts.” People were “forced to flee”; I was being told “fires are coming.” These terms must have been around before but my awareness of them made me realise that something out there had changed. After the worst year of fire ever recorded in across Canada, wildfires - something that used to be an occasional and extreme news event  - were now a fixed and anticipated part of the news cycle. 

In Forest Fire Blankets I use thrifted woollen blankets typically 5ft x 6ft in size, text and domestic craft techniques to interrogate how the contemporary phenomenon of forest fires in British Columbia and the rest of Canada is reported in the media. I choose random news headlines from the radio and internet and then hand draw text from these headlines onto paper to create patterns for cutting fabric. I stitch the resulting fabric words and numbers by hand on to the blankets and if needed, I also mend the blankets through darning and patching. In the first few blankets I also hand embroidered the date of the original news item. 

There is no doubt that as climate change intensifies wildfires are increasing in number, scope and potential threat to people’s homes and lives. In the contemporary 24-hour news cycles, fires are breathlessly reported as an unstoppable and worsening natural disaster, and last week’s emergency is quickly replaced by a new story. The Forest Fire Blankets are a means to record and make sense of the way this destruction is reported by granting the words and numbers a material and long-lasting existence. Through the slow act of craft, the blankets act as a form of anti-activism, presenting information in a non-violent way that evokes materiality and security, even as that security is exploded by the words and figures on the blankets.

Blankets are items that everyone is familiar with. They conjure warmth, the comfort of home and the feeling of fabric against skin that is an essential and universal part of the human experience. I use woollen blankets because before  the invention of Kevlar domestic fire blankets were made from wool. They are naturally fire-resistant, but they are of course powerless in the face of wildfires. Many of these blankets are also evidence of our colonial history, coming as they do from England and Scotland. However, they have survived for generations and have the potential to survive for years to come, and thus provide a means of remembering and integrating these hard truths of our times. 

Being in the presence of the Forest Fire Blankets you are aware of both their size their size and the hours and hours of hand sewing that went into making them, evidenced by the thousands of visible stitches on each blanket. My hope is this grants the viewer space and time to reflect upon what is happening in this moment, the ways in which forest fires are reported in the news and how that reporting is influenced by the colonial history and contemporary industrial forestry practices that have created this devastating situation in the first place.