""I had no words at that time other than the ones of making," artist Alisa Golden told KQED. "I always feel a kind of catharsis, both within the process and after I am finished with the project." Golden and many other artists have used visual mediums to convey the eerie, dangerous beauty of that day. KQED compiled images of their work and thoughts below."
"When lightning sparked a fire siege in August of 2020, smoke blanketed the Bay Area for weeks. "We'd started having really bad air quality days," Woodruff-Long said. "I was taking screenshots of San Francisco from the Purple Air app, just over and over. After I'd been doing this for almost two months, everything started looking like a quilt to me.""
Artists in the Bay Area transformed the surreal Orange Sky—thick smoke from August 2020 wildfires—into visual work conveying danger and beauty. Alisa Golden experienced catharsis through making, finding relief during and after projects. Quilter Lorraine Woodruff-Long turned quilting into full-time work, documented air quality screenshots and found landscapes beginning to resemble quilts; she positioned quilts as tools for protest. Painter Kim Cogan photographed the orange skies with family and feared for his newborn daughter, describing the scene as apocalyptic. These works use fiber, paint, and photography to communicate climate impacts and emotional responses to wildfire smoke.
Read at Kqed
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