Galerie Fenna Wehlau - after the burn - Erin Wiersma

Fire is the end and fire is the beginning

Gently-rolling grassy hills of breathtaking beauty, the richness of a largely untouched natural environment in its diversity of grasses and wildflowers - this is the Konza Prairie. Officially known as the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), the Konza, is a hub of research dedicated to maintaining prairie grassland ecosystems, located in the plains of the north central United States. This Great Plains region was a diverse ecosystem of grasses, flowers, millions of bison and other animals and fire. It was the home to several nations of indigenous peoples including the Kaw, Osage, Pawnee. These elements thrived on a balanced use of the prairie.  The settlement of the land, the tilling of the soil and the elimination of the bison ended the great tallgrass prairie.

The tallgrass prairie originally stretched from Canada across the midsection of North America all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, covering an area of 170 million acres. With only about four percent remaining, the Konza is a site for continuing research to assure a long future for the remaining prairie. Since 2017, Erin Wiersma has been working in this land. Her practice involves creating drawings with the earth itself, through many hours walking the Konza working in the land using the biochar as medium during and after prescribed burns. 

Following many of the practices of the native nations who preceded them, today the Konza Prairie is maintained by prescribed burns as one of the more significant methods of land management. Established in 1971, the Konza Prairie Biological Station is managed by Kansas State University. KPBS has been conducting research on the ecosystem, specifically fire, grazing, and climate variability. To maintain the grasslands and improve the quality of the soil there, targeted burnings divided by sector - set for research purposes. The burns are an instrument to control the growth of invasive shrubs, improve soil quality, and thus promote the replenishment of native grasses and wildflowers.

Erin Wiersma’s artistic practice is informed by the history of the prairie: its former inhabitants, its flora and fauna, and the contemporary working of the land. Her drawings express a deep connection to this landscape. The starting point of each drawing is the moment immediately after a deliberate burning of the grasslands up to over a year after, when the full lifecycle has returned vegetation. Her Konza Works on Paper are created during a performance, both in and with the prairie. She closely follows the topography of the land, either after the fire has moved across the land or in previously charred patches of prairie. The artist takes into account the natural elements of wind, temperature, and humidity when making each work. Equally decisive for the aggregate state of each of her artworks is the factor of time, the scheduling of the burnings in the respective regions.

Wiersma pulls, lifts, and drags large sheets of paper over and onto the burnt ground. This work is an expression of her sculptural conception of paper, which through the use of a roller (around which the paper is wrapped) or moving the material by hand, allows for specific interaction with the land. The artist moves the paper over the burned grass, continuously adding imprints of nature that come together as moving frottages of the landscape. Equally decisive for the aggregate state of each of her artworks is the factor of time, dependent as her practice is upon the scheduled burns in the respective sectors of the prairie preserve. Fragility speaks to the notion of time, and only in the final state does the artist conceive her works as two-dimensional, fragile works on paper.

In the end, Wiersma’s Konza Prairie Drawings are abstract portraits of the landscape in at times highly condensed strokes of gray, black, green, and earth tones with tightly placed chords of lines, marks, and scratches. Their all-over principle is an expression of the vastness of the landscape in which they are created. Not only that – nature itself can be said to add its veiny craquelure to the artist’s composition! In their complexity, Wiersma’s works on paper achieve a remarkable pictorial depth. They have absorbed the power of this land, its uniqueness, its deep history and capacity for renewal, and have followed in the footsteps of the indigenous tribes that once lived here.

Fire is a vehicle of civilization and culture. As a source of warmth and light, as well as of destruction and death, it is a thoroughly ambivalent element for both humans and nature. The spectrum of associations ranges from romantic campfires to uncontrollable forest fires, from heat-producing stoves to deadly conflagrations. The myth of death and rebirth is rooted in fire. In art, the spectrum ranges from Baroque paintings such as Peter Paul Rubens’s Prometheus (1636–37) to William Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1835). Especially since the late 1960s, new unifying artistic positions of landscape, fire, and body have emerged, such as the Land/Body Art of Judy Chicago, who, with the intention of feminizing the landscape and breaking through masculine structures, lined it with soft pink plumes of smoke and let political statements rise in smokey letters. For her Smoke Bodies (1972), she painted women’s bodies and photographed them against the barren desert landscape. Of particular note are the Fire Fountains (1961) and Fire Paintings (1962–62) by Yves Klein, who, for the latter series, worked with an industrial blowtorch on Swedish cardboard and had the fire extinguished by a fireman. He, too, saw his work in the context of the vastness of nature: “Fire for me is the future without forgetting the past. It is the memory of nature.” On the other hand, since 1975, David Nash has been placing his wooden sculptures, such as the Charred Oak Menhirs, in a furnace, in open fires, or working on them with a flamethrower.

In comparison to this artistic lineage of fire in art, Erin Wiersma’s work proceeds from controlled burnings with significance for the environment. In the seemingly lifeless state of nature, she collects traces of charcoal and other remnants of burned grasses and wildflowers with the sensitive paper and, with her work, giving visibility to the renewal. With her fascinating Konza Prairie Drawings, Erin Wiersma shows us this brief, seemingly invisible moment of transition from a state of lifelessness to a new blossoming. As an artist with a practice of walking, she traverses temporal planes and geographical variations. Her works on paper visualize the moment of rejuvenation as well as of decay, and thus the entire cycle of nature: Fire is the end, and fire is the beginning.

Fenna Wehlau

(Foreword to the catalogue "After the Burn" )