The fire in the mind: memory, myth & matter
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2024
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My MFA project sets out to make fire 'strange' again. That is to say, I foreground intrigue and complexity in the contemplation of common place and metaphorical fires. By crafting artworks as intimate envoys for larger existential concerns and human agency in a world fundamentally mediated by fire, I engage with fire as a generative empirical phenomenon and its accompanying deep theoretical and philosophical heritage. Ever since fire was first harnessed, it has played a pivotal role in shaping human cognition and desire, and consequently, in reshaping the Earth. In my creative process, I bring fire into focus through a lens that is sympa thetic to new materialism, botanical paradigms and neo-animism. My work borrows from the metalanguage of mythology and ancient belief systems to mediate between ideas of conscious and unconscious, memory and imagination, nature and culture, past and present. The essential thread that runs through my research is the ideation of fire as manifest in the mind, body and the object/thing world. Crucially, all the materials used in my artworks are corporeally mediated by fire. Some - like stone - originate from it. Others, like clay or metal, are shaped by it. Wood, however, is central to my material concerns: trees and timber scorched in wildfires feature in my work to symbolise human flesh or the roots of individuals and collectives, bringing with them their own complex histories of climate, displacement and exploitation. These materials, freighted with metaphor, are the means and trigger through which I create carefully crafted, anomalous objects that support lucid and productive itineraries of thought on both 'fire' and 'mind' and the aesthetic that brings them together.
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Vives, D. 2024. The fire in the mind: memory, myth & matter. . ,Faculty of Humanities ,Michaelis School of Fine Art. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/41377