The Art of Fire

The Art of Fire

Fire, Water, and the Pursuits of Ethan Turpin

By Tom Pazderka | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
January 16, 2025

Editor’s Note:  At the time we made this assignment, we knew that it had been a dry year and fire season was quickly approaching, as well as the January anniversary of the Montecito mudslides in 2018. We had no idea, of course, that wildfires would be raging through Southern California, making this important documentary art exhibition even more compelling and critical. Our hearts go out to all of our neighbors affected by the fires and, of course, the brave first responders and our journalistic colleagues on the scene of this devastating destruction.

Ethan Turpin’s first major museum exhibition, WILDLAND: Ethan Turpin’s Collaborations on Fire and Water, on view at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art through March 22, brings together 10 years of the artist’s work and provides the audience a glimpse into the strange, fascinating, and forbidden realms of fire and water as witnessed through Turpin’s cameras. Employing time-lapse videos, documentary filmmaking, and photography, in combination with public service and education, Turpin works on the bleeding edge of art and journalism, the two worlds perfectly complementing and supplementing one another. 

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, “one of the most flammable places on Earth,” the artist’s background and family history play a not-insignificant part in the exhibition. Focusing on the causes and effects of wildfires and climate change, WILDLAND immerses the viewer into an aesthetically stunning and educational visual experience, which is itself a kind of psychological entry into the artist’s thought process and oeuvre. The culmination of Turpin’s life experience — his father was a firefighter — also became his life’s mission: the founding of the Burn Cycle Project, a massive collaborative effort between artists, scientists, documentarians, journalists, and fire service personnel to raise awareness and understanding of the behaviors, roles, and dangers of wildfires. 

Around the end of summer and beginning of fall 2024, I sat down with the artist in his shared Santa Barbara studio space, the fabled establishment “The Rondo,” to talk about WILDLAND and where his work has been taking him. What follows is an edited version of a much longer interview and discussion. 

I think there is a deeper inner drive, perhaps a psychological one, behind your work. Why don’t we start there?  I’ve spent 11 years doing the Burn Cycle Project with the idea of collaborating with a lot of people, exploring fire, and hopefully helping communities in the process. There’s a very public aspect to that work, though sometimes it’s social practice — community engagements, instructional videos, and things like that. I have a press pass, so I can get past roadblocks, and apps that tell me where to go. But I think the work comes from a deep personal history. My father was a firefighter, and he took his life in 2011. After that, I decided to start making artwork about fire. Whether it’s genetics or some kind of ancestral interest, I don’t know. Either way, the more I learned about climate change, I started to see the symptoms of that change, and it became a salient thing for me to invest in creatively. 

That makes sense; your father was running toward fires as a firefighter and now you’ve picked up where he left off in a way, but it feels like you’re fighting a different sort of fire, an inner one perhaps. From the work, I feel this need to get the shot, to see what the fire looks like before, during, and after. It feels like a symbolic re-creation of the act of the firefighter, but in a more abstracted sense.  People in certain jobs, like firefighting, get to experience a kind of spiritual passage that is rare in our culture. There is also the myth of the hero, because in our culture that is what we often call firefighters. I don’t think my dad was comfortable with that. What actually happens on the job isn’t all glory. It’s horror and trauma. There are failings that occur when one ends up second-guessing things one did. I approach it like a photojournalist when I go to fire and end up making art. I take the gear and put on the PPE [personal protection equipment] and go. Having that and the press pass let me pass through that threshold, and that threshold is a really significant thing. All of this and actual fire safety training allows me to have this passage into another world. 

It sounds like you’re talking about crossing a boundary beyond which normal mortal people cannot go. We could talk about it in psychoanalytic terms. What comes to mind is the id, or inner desire, or in other words, the libidinal, which I think encapsulates how we tend to think of fire — the inner fire, the spark, things getting hot, and so on. But I’m picking up on something like nostalgia, which isn’t exactly apparent in your work.  And grandiosity.

Yeah, grandiosity, the sublime. Massive ash clouds and plumes, the mountainous landscapes, and, of course, the lonely observer that has a privileged view that nobody else will get to see.  Right. When I was young, my dad would be gone for 24-hour shifts, and it was a big deal when he came home. I would immediately ask to sit on his lap and to tell me about the calls he went on, which he didn’t necessarily want to do. But he’d tell me these amazing stories, and then I wouldn’t see him a lot of the time. 

Right, perhaps stories that border on mythology?  Every fire is full of interesting stories. When I was 9, a fire started in a neighboring property. I was watching at a friend’s house through binoculars and finally realized I was looking at my house, with air tankers dropping this pink and red fire retardant and finding out later that my dad was directing those planes. That same fire, my mom got handcuffed for running the roadblock to save our cats.

And the nostalgia?  In terms of nostalgia, the spectacle is undeniable. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. But it goes beyond transcendental terror. What’s strange is that after the fire front has passed, because everyone’s evacuated and the firefighters are working elsewhere, it becomes a very quiet, empty place that is transfixing. There are just these embers and things blowing in. I’ve at times found myself in a kind of dream state where I’m half asleep, things slow down, and I am there composing pictures, lulled half to sleep by the crackle and glow of the fire.

Nostalgia and the sublime are similar emotional experiences, like staring into a fire or at clouds. But part of the sublime is that one gets to experience something that is forbidden, something one isn’t meant to be or allowed to be seen. Your cameras being swallowed up by the fire let us in on that a little bit.  Yes, I had that experience when I first encountered fire camera footage done by Ian Grob at the Forest Service. He was a filmmaker doing these shoots on prescribed burns, turning the camera toward the fire to document materials being burned and tested. He revealed this visceral experience with a potential to reflect something sublime as well. 

[Click to enlarge] Manzanita sprout, macro (left); Sage sprout, regrowth | Credit: Ethan Turpin

I get this sense that fire in your work is something like an artifact. There is this psychoanalytic concept of the human physical, mental, and emotional bodies being structured like Russian nesting dolls, extending through space and time, and these artifacts give us access to these different emotions like nostalgia and the sublime. It’s what we feel when looking at art or something like a bombed-out city after a war. These artifacts form a connection to past experiences and sort of freeze them in time. Nostalgia is an attempt to keep the memories intact, while the sublime is this violent event that rips those memories apart.  I do think that this relates back to the feelings I have about my dad and my son now. I felt this searing grief after the death of my dad that felt like trial by fire. I had this experience of narratives being shattered and passing through this ring of fire, and all that was left afterward was love. 

The first thing I did was go to a burnt landscape and started to make art again. 

Then when the Alisal Fire burned through the Arroyo Hondo Preserve, my wife and I were trying to conceive a child. I shot that fire and then set up cameras in the burned landscape. And then these plants, which my dad taught me about, started coming up at the same time my son was also beginning to grow. I kept going back to collect the camera data and change the batteries and it became like this ritual. And then the landscape became overwhelmed by flowers, and I actually pulled those cameras at that time right before he was born, because I knew we were entering a new chapter. After Sammy was born, I wasn’t going to have as much time, and they had done their job, and so that marked this nine-month period of gathering images, which also became this intense nostalgic experience. 

Those are the nesting dolls, but they are so numerous and tightly nested. I had and continue to have this moment by moment, encounter by encounter, day by day with him, and I can see the change, and it’s so often bittersweet. 

Yes, I totally get it. At some level, you become “just” an observer, not indifferent, but basically someone that does not intervene. That’s what your work feels like, which is interesting, because you’re not really “just” a documentarian either. There is a lot of intentional framing, collage, and editing at the end of which is art rather than a documentary.  There is also animation.

Right, exactly. I’m interested in how the process of getting the right images works. Can you walk me through it? Let’s say you flash your press card at the roadblock and you’re on the “inside.” Are you now on your own or with others, firefighters maybe? Are they telling you where to go, where not to go? Fires can be very unpredictable.  There are media clusters and press photographers that travel in groups, but they’re not necessarily affiliated with each other. There is shared information there as well. Someone might take off, and others assume they must know something and so they follow to see what it is. But I don’t always want the closest shot of a helicopter dropping water. My priority instead might be like a slower burn place that is more subtle or something new, something I haven’t seen before. I can end up being on my own a lot more than other people, and that’s unusual, so I have to always be checking how to stay safe. But now that I have a son, I am rethinking those parameters a bit. 

How did the WILDLAND exhibition come about, and how did you conceptualize it?  The WILDLAND exhibit spans very personal and public art. I have a deep familial connection to the content and also have a practice of working with communities to generate awareness and conversations around resilience, often regarding wildfire specifically. I record wildland fires and revisit the sites after rains and during regrowth. I also simply love hiking and have come to realize that this practice of going to nature, bearing witness, and creating something from it has a devotional aspect, with seeds going back to my upbringing in rural parts of Santa Ynez Valley. 

In 2021, I was approached by Judy Larson and Chris Rupp at the [Westmont] Museum, and I have been getting to know people and visiting with faculty there — I’m learning about their experiences as a community and their specific position on the mountain ecosystem. In my view, WILDLAND centers a space to contemplate and honor the Westmont community’s own experience going through the 2008 Tea Fire. I’d heard the story of 1,000 students, faculty, and staff sheltering in place in the school gym as the fire swept through campus. Then I learned that journalist Ray Ford had been out there alone with his camera, and the next morning, Brad Elliott captured the beginning of the recovery process. When I saw the special collection of these photos at the Westmont Library, I recognized that kind of transitional, emotional space from my own experiences documenting wildfire, and felt a combined, collaged scene could function as a special artifact of Westmont’s site and community resilience. As part of the exhibition, we decided to include outdoor and extended educational experiences, with talks, guided hikes of oak restoration, an outdoor projection event called “Ember Trees,” and an environmentally focused Family Day. The show has been an opportunity to advance a variety of multimedia practices in order to shift time and space in our perceptions of the landscapes where we live. I wanted to present fire and water, because for over a decade I’ve been focusing on both, sometimes separately, but this has provided me a good inner and practical balance, and I think observing them together offers us ways to consider personal and community resilience. 

I understand that you’ve collaborated with different people on it: artists, scientists and so on.  Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to work with amazing collaborators and really wanted to expand the scope of some projects with them. So, artists Mike Demavivas, David Gordon, Zach Gill, Tai Rodrig, and Jonathan PJ Smith, along with scientist Naomi Tague, have also worked hard on this exhibit. I learned a lot about interconnectivity in nature by working with Tague and her lab at the UCSB Bren School. She is among the deepest thinkers I know and applies her concentration on finding ways to preserve the unknown in Earth Systems research.

I know this is a loaded question, but who are you as an artist? In other words, how did you come to make this show?  In 2013, I founded the Burn Cycle Project as a hub for collaboration and community engagement around wildfire. A lot of meaningful partnerships have come out of that, and it has a very public aspect, often involving pop-up exhibits of the “Walk into Wildfire” projection piece. The WILDLAND exhibit really leans into water as well with immersive video. Over the past decade, I’ve been iterating visualizations with Professor Naomi Tague about how water interacts with other forces in the landscape. “Tree Water” is a brand-new video installation that uses moving watercolor pigments to represent the hidden dynamics of soil, roots, and air. I’m really excited to share this work, and it’s been meaningful as a studio practice as well as something I now contemplate when I visit sites recovering from wildfires.

The layout of the exhibit actually creates a passage through interactive pieces dealing fairly cerebrally with climate change and then proceeds into a dark gallery space of intense natural phenomena, including transitions from destruction to recovery. One of the first things people will see are the “Stereocollision” 3D photo collages — my own kind of surreal fever dream picturing symptoms of climate calamity. That sit-down installation is placed in contrast to a very different interactive experience, “Future Mountain: An Interactive Fire, Water, and Climate Model,” which takes a very straight look at climate scenarios on a landscape. I feel like this is a context we are living through and that I wanted to integrate and move beyond, into a space of awe and care. The main gallery, full of immersive photography and video, is intended to create a threshold into a world of sometimes hidden forces in nature.

All of this work shares a common personal interest in seeing what aesthetically emerges from complex systems and scenarios. Emergence as a principal theme may occur for me in the studio with video camera experiments or in observing big transformations in the landscape, both creative and destructive. Part of what fascinates me about both wildland fire and water is that every time I think I’ve got a clear picture of how they work, I learn something new that shifts the perspective. And yet there is also a simplicity to their elemental power. Fire and water can take on mythic qualities in their scale, while having an intimacy, too — water helps heal burns, and fire can warm us when we are soaking wet. So. I want to present these forces as a way into conversations we can have about how we live within the beauty and risk of this landscape.

WILDLAND: Ethan Turpin’s Collaborations on Fire and Water at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (955 La Paz Rd.) is open through March 22. Museum hours are Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., and Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free. See westmont.edu/museum for more information.

Among several scheduled programs in conjunction with the exhibition, on Thursday, January 30, at 5:30 p.m., artist Ethan Turpin and UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science professor Naomi Tague will present a lecture on their collaborations. The talk takes place in Adams Classroom 216 at Westmont College. For more information and a list of upcoming events relating to the exhibition, please visit westmont.edu/wildland.

About the author: Tom Pazderka is an artist, writer, and curator.

About the exhibition: “Ethan Turpin brings artists, scientists, and educators together to create powerful experiences that broaden perspectives and deepen awareness of underlying natural forces where we live in Southern California,” says Judy L. Larson, Professor of Art History and Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum Director. Enter the exhibition and you’ll find yourself immersed in a layered landscape — trees glowing with embers and mesmerizing webs of water being absorbed by tree roots. You can also explore hidden worlds, like standing inside of a wildfire, and the effects of time and space on a landscape through interactive displays. In WILDLAND, Ethan Turpin and his collaborators blend art and science to reveal the awesomeness of nature, and the respect and appreciation it commands from us.