Bone Fire - Limited Edition Reproduction

11" x 14" fine art print printed with professional inks on archival, acid-free, and cruelty-free paper.
Limited edition of 100, numbered and signed by the artist
Ships flat in a rigid kraft mailer with sturdy acid-free backing board for easy framing.

A ragged red fox, Vulpes vulpes, perches atop an extinguished bon fire fueled by the skulls of her wild kin. Her paws dig into the charcoaled bark of the Garry oak tree that was hacked down as a sacrifice to the flames. Its ancient branches, home to hundreds of species, ribbed limb after limb to be burned at the stake, the bon fire leaving nothing but bones and ash to mark the grave of a once thriving oak habitat.

While researching this series the term bonfire came to mind, and I played around with ways to tie the word to an ecologic concept. I learned that bon fire doesn’t mean “good fire” at all. It actually is derived from “bone fire”, a nod to large fires being set to discard unwanted things, including animals (and humans).

As more people move into rural areas - referred to as “Wildlife-Urban Interfaces”-wildlife and habitat destruction increases. The potential for human-caused fire also increases, which, ironically, means fire poses a bigger threat than ever to the humans who live in this interstitial space between City and Wilderness.