Making kin with wild fire : a relational design practice

Summary: Standing next to trees as they are consumed by living swirls of heat during a wildfire will make you quickly realize the precarity of your own position. This feeling only deepens after walking past melted microwaves while surveying towns impacted and transformed by this unyielding force. This sense of imbalance between the sites we live in and how we choose to inhabit them is hard to ignore. Yet, away from the fire, the material culture that contributes to this disjunction continues uninterrupted. The objects we use everyday affect the world we live in. This thesis project is about coming to see where we are, how we live, and using objects as storytellers to transfer meaning from this unique place of relations. It is about imagining ways of making that can reknit ways of living. Ways of being tied to the land. I make 3D printed ceramic flasks—vessels made with foraged clays that undergo a transformation, an interaction, as they are vitrified by wildfires. These functional objects are experiments in ways of making that care for the interconnected web of relationships that the objects we put into the world have. Can we co-design collaboratively with natural forces? Can we craft with wildfire? Can we expand our understanding of kinship and use this inclusivity to re-tool our design practices in order to reconsider who, how, and what we are designing for? The hope is that these vessels carry new ways of seeing and an imperative for new ways of acting. This ongoing project is a personal one, consisting of material assemblages that share parts of my relationships with the places I am making in and the more-than-human actors that I am in conversation with—the wind, the clay, the robots, and of course the fire.