Smoke on Arches 88. 22″ x 30″.
Completed at Ragdale Foundation Artist’s Residency, August of 2011.

This series of images was made with kitchen matches on a smooth, porous printmaking paper. I chose to work with kitchen matches after doing research on items that are banned on airplanes by the TSA; matches presented both a unique and beautiful drawing material, and also one that doubles as a weapon in a large enough quantity. In this series, I used the smoke from hundreds of matches to produce images of fiery landscapes, and landscapes with explosions on the horizon.

Eventually, I was able to manipulate the strokes of the matches in order to get yellows, reds, and even blues into some works. As they were created outdoors, and I also was able to incorporate the wind as a method of blowing the smoke across the paper, giving a sense of the earth in the landscape rupturing open and moving towards the viewer. I feel that the smoke paintings have a quality that allows them to fluctuate between the beautiful and the horrifying, perhaps in the deep blackness of the charcoal captured on the paper, or perhaps in the oddly organic quality of the smoke that has been pushed around by factors outside of my control, like wind or sparking phosphates.