My interest in incorporating fire into LEVO began in the throws of straightening out a mess of metaphoric leads. I wanted a visual shorthand that signaled utility and excess, much like the function and experience of anxiety. Fire both serves and stimulates anxiety, it has a profound, cross-cultural, practical and metaphorical substance. Safety. Danger. So with lit incense sticks, I laboriously stubbed hot ash into test fiber to make small but conspicuous holes, one at a time.
Eventually, with the help of my Dad, I turned to the miniature butane torch, applying controlled jets of flame to the fabric at up to 1300 degrees Celsius. I hoped these markings might stimulate familiar connective metaphors. Destruction/creation. Balance, restoration. Action, and the ruination of one form for the generation of another.
In the Iliad, an aggrieved and raging Achilles is likened to a fire meeting devastation to anything in its path. But here, on a sunny Australian July, Dad and I worked under the shade of the old gum tree I climbed as a kid, with careful elemental measure. It was a pleasant return to place and I devoted myself to the creative push/pull – what is taken/what is left. The limited combustion of fibers is material learning, an arresting occupancy and a larger material and metaphorical study.
Megan Kennedy 