Alicia’s Flatware

Tawnya Lively, American

Alicia’s Flatware, 2017

After her home was destroyed by the October 2017 fires, artist Tawnya Lively launched the “Firestorm Mosaic Project”. Taking broken tiles, kitchenware, and other objects recovered from house fires and refashioning them into mosaics Lively hopes to create new heirlooms out of the ashes of the old. While this began as a personal work of art, Lively has expanded the project, creating images for others, coordinating mosaic artists to complete their own projects, and even “hosting workshops for those who would like to make their own projects”. These pieces tell of the momentous personal and human cost of wildfires, but still create a beautiful work of art that can allow the owners to both remember and move forward from the fires. Label by Caitlin Blomo

Alicia’s Flatware by Tawnya Lively consists of a single dining set that is framed by broken pieces of china of the same style as the half broken cup and burnt plate in the center. The fork and spoon are made of now damaged silver; all of the pieces were salvaged from ashes in California after a wildfire. The pieces together make a full dining set for one person to have a meal, but they are now tattered and unusable. This creates a microcosm of the number of homes and lives that were lost to these wildfires by displaying one set of lonely dishes as if to display a lost meal. Label by Jordan Stofko

Anthemis Landscape

Tawnya Lively, American

Anthemis Landscape, 2018

This mosaic, a part of Lively’s Firestorm Mosaic Project, is made from the shattered ceramic pieces of a cookware dish that was destroyed in the October 2017 forest fires in California. This mosaic depicts a small landscape scene in which a few yellow flowers bloom into a white sky of fragmented porcelain. On the level of content, Anthemis Landscape highlights the paradoxical struggle of growth from destruction —flowers growing from the ashes of a wildfire are quite literally illustrated by these images of flowers growing out of fragmented ceramic. By taking a material object from these fires and constructing a seemingly optimistic, though contradictory, image of regrowth from cataclysmic destruction, this mosaic also operates as an affective archive of the fires, documenting not just the reality of the event but the inescapable fears, emotions, and hopes which surround and permeate the fires. Label by Maxwell Cloe

Creek Fire

Jennifer Rochlin, American, born 1968

Creek Fire, 2017

Jennifer Rochlin’s clay sculpture is a product of her emotions surrounding the growth in fires around her California residence, with this piece specifically recalling the Creek Fire in the winter of 2017. On the clay, she depicts horses, birds, mountain lions, and other animals, inspired by the 29 ranch horses that were killed in the flames. Rochlin explains that the abstract etches on the outside of the clay are a visual representation, and an actual product, of her anxiety during the fire and the fear and sadness that fills her as she hears fire stories like this. To round out the symbolic nature of the piece she writes, “It’s sad and poetic somehow that you fire the clay to solidify the marks.” She uses art in this instance to represent the Creek Fire in an expressionistic way, as well to represent her own emotions and difficulty coping with these fires in California. Label by Maeve Marsh