Fuelling Curiosity in a New Exhibit: Fire Followers

Painter Megan Majewski finds creativity goes hand in hand with curiosity. “I get inspiration from a lot of different places, and it continuously changes. I let myself go down these rabbit holes with experimentation and research and see where I go from there. Usually, a body of work ends up unfolding itself when I’ve found something that really interests me that I want to explore with my artwork,” says Majewski.

Megan Majewski doing field work

That curiosity has led her to create a new series of mixed media paintings and essays called Fire Followers, with writer Sharon Roberts. Both Majewski and Roberts grew up in forest communities in British Columbia (BC). Majewski from the Kootenays and Roberts from the Okanagan. “Living in BC, forest fires are very much a part of all of our lives, but I realized that I’d never actually been to a forest after a forest fire. The series, Fire Followers, grew organically from an interest in seeing pictures of forest fires and the flowers that bloom after forest fires,” says Majewski. 

So, with no end goal but fuelled by sheer curiosity, Majewski and Roberts went on a road trip from Vancouver to visit their old stomping grounds and learn more about forest fires. In the Okanagan and the Kootenays, they were able to see the difference between healthy managed forest fires and unhealthy wildfires: “some forests struggle after a fire because they are unhealthy. Still desolate and black. Things have a hard time growing. Then there are other areas where we saw a healthier forest fire, and even months later, it’s a lush field of flowers. Things are really thriving.”

The aftermath of an unhealthy forest fire, a healthy forest fire, and Majewski’s art piece, Rise Again, inspired by the thriving lupin growing from the ashes

“After going to those places and seeing those things, we realized that this is so interesting and so important that we wanted to create an exhibit and show forest fires through an artistic lens. A lot of stuff out there is very much science- and research-based. We thought we could show how we see things and maybe add a different layer to this conversation. Going into this from not knowing anything about forestry and learning about this for the first time, it was eye-opening,” says Majewski.

Charcoal samples from the field

Majewski and Roberts aim to educate through their art and essays. While Roberts tells stories of the resilient communities that experience forest fires, Majewski paints the beauty of what grows after forest fires. By doing so, Majewski incorporates layers of different media to create an abstract effect. She even uses charcoal from the forest fires she visited and adds it to her pieces: “I felt that was very important in bringing the old forest that’s burnt, grinding that up, making a pigment, and adding it to the painting. It’s like paying tribute to the old forest that has shed to help a new forest grow.”

In this collection, Fire Followers evokes the energy of destruction and renewal. A play between life and death and the beauty that comes from that cycle. Majewski found herself drawn to “the lupin and fireweed. I love those pretty soft colours and then mixing them with a very stark black of the charcoal. I love the contrast between those two. It’s just this mix of beauty and darkness together.”

Beauty Rising from the Ruin

Majewski hopes that this exhibit will attract the curiosity of those that may not know much about forest fires: “I hope that it draws people into the conversation in a different way…that they’ll learn something new about forest fires, the same as we did going into this and learning how they’re not all bad. It’s a complicated issue, but if we can educate ourselves on how we can work to change our perceptions, then maybe we can help make the problem not so bad or go towards fixing some of the problems with our forests.”

Fire Followers, a collection of artwork and essays, will be showing at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in January 2021.

You can also view Majewski’s art on her website and Instagram.