Fireweed from Ashes: Creating Hope

Abstract

In the Summer of 2023, I was immediately captivated by Holly Schmidt’s (2021)  Fireweed Fields when my LLED565Y class visited the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery  at the University of British Columbia. This outdoor installation is part of Schmidt’s  extended artist residency, Vegetal Encounters. An excerpt from the Belkin Gallery  website (2024) describes Schmidt’s brilliant work:

“Fireweed Fields transforms the Belkin’s lawns into a fireweed meadow, encouraging  increased biodiversity through gradual succession as a metaphor for the resurgence of  life after a crisis. This installation acknowledges the global climate emergency: by  tearing through the fabric of maintained lawns and colonial ideals, it plants the initial  seeds for change and catalyzes dialogue, creative experimentation and new biodiversity  research and learning opportunities. Meadow plants include fireweed, lupins, yarrow,  and Idaho fescue. Two cedar boardwalks lead into the meadow, their configurations  referencing the rhizomatic root structure of fireweed”. Schmidt’s (2021) creation illustrates Rosi Braidotti’s (2016) notion of transformation being embedded in the  possibility to ‘think against one’s times, in spite of the times and out of concern for one’s  times.’

This imaginative and provocative work was unlike anything I had ever seen, and it  ignited something in me. I had lived amongst fireweed all my life but never knew this  remarkable plant- it was time to meet a new friend!