“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” (Perthshire Magazine)

The Fireberg ruminates on interconnected planetary disasters and sociopolitical climate chaos. The outlines of three January 2025 Los Angeles fires have been superimposed to form a fictional iceberg. From left to right, the fires grow from Day 1, to Day 3, to Day 6, then transition into a melting iceberg. Viewers are encouraged to take in the piece from left to right; inhale while looking at the first three and exhale on the last three. This mimics the planet’s breath - wind - which directs fires and sculpts icebergs that bob in the water in a motion called “breathing.”

The title is a play on the Slavic story “The Firebird,” with its themes of greed and difficult journeys, as well as the mythical phoenix known for rising from the ashes. Yet this phoenix leads straight to the ruin of a melted iceberg, a harbinger of the climate crisis, which has been the focus of my work the past several years. All six etchings were created from one copperplate that I repeatedly altered so that the earlier imagery is lost and can never be recreated. I’m from Los Angeles and watched through a phone screen as many friends lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades Fires. These burn scars form the large conglomerate shape in the etching. The smaller shape in the top left is the Hurst Fire, which was near my parents’ home.

Documentation by Kelsey Floyd