Swailing 2011

This project was curated by Kate Hackman, and designed for the Project Space at the Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, Mo. 

More information about this project here: 

http://www.charlottestreet.org/2011/05/swailing-by-lee-emma-running-opening-friday-may-20-at-project-space/

Swailing

In my work I am attentive to the particularities of my landscape. It is my job to be aware of the both subtle changes that come with the change of season, and the intricacy of specimens gathered in the natural world. The prescribed burns of the Midwest have been a mystery to me, both for their spectacle, and for what they reveal in their wake.

Swailing: the prescribed burning of prairie or marshland.

Somewhere between sailing and wailing. That’s what I thought it would sound like to hear the fire take all of the grass at once. Instead I was surprised at how well flame behaved on this still afternoon, a leisurely crackling flame blowing across acres of land. Different than the fierceness of wildfire I imagined, this line of fire crossed a huge expanse of landscape, and simply stopped. Leaving a blackened field behind it.

Even the next day I smell it in my hair, on my hands. I go back to walk through the smoldering field now that it’s cool. The monotone of the March landscape interrupted by a charcoal flatness. Each footstep I take sends up a plume of ash. Larger branches and felled trees hold clutches of embers below floating columns of blue smoke. No one is monitoring this. It will extinguish itself there is nothing left to urge it on.

The grasses lie in even charred piles. When I touch them they crumble in my hands, the root-end bright yellow against the charcoal shaft. In the ashes I find half a canine mouth, a deer jaw, a singed snake. Branches leave stenciled prints against the ground.