Kamloops resident Casey Macauley turns burned wood from the Tremont Creek and White Rock Lake wildfires into art.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Casey Macauley
March 06, 2022 - 7:04 AM
Equipped with burning tools and knowledge of block printing, a Kamloops man is salvaging wood left behind from wildfire and turning it into art.
Casey Macauley is a long-time forester who decided to harvest the burnt wood left behind from the Tremont Creek and White Rock Lake wildfires this summer as he saw an opportunity.
“I had noticed other artists had been doing these imprints and I thought I would really like to try that,” he said. “I wasn’t so much thinking about the story of it all, I was thinking more about just making art and then once I started to go on social media a bit with it and put it out in the community, it seemed people really identified with art that came out of the ashes of those fires, so to speak.”
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To create the prints, Macauley will first harvest discs of wood and then planes and sands them, before burning them to exposure the different ring patterns inside the wood. The discs can then be used for print, similar to block printmaking, he said.
Multiple discs can be used for the same prints before the block starts to fill in.
“I’ve had to re-prepare all of the blocks for printing to re-expose the rings,” he said.
Macauley can spend up to two hours prepping the disc and even more time finding the right wood in the forest. His prints were originally showcased in two Kamloops cafes and have been growing in popularity ever since.
He’s sold roughly 50 prints so far from eight blocks. In the winter season, it’s been difficult to collect the wood, so he’s hoping to collect more this spring. Interest is coming from across B.C., as well as Ontario and from outside of Canada in places like Texas, South Carolina and California.
Many customers in the Thompson-Okanagan region are reaching out to request the prints as they have a connection to the wildfires.
READ MORE: Kamloops Fire Centre sees record-breaking number of hectares burned this year
“They’ll say ‘my home was almost lost last year’ or ‘my brother was a firefighter…’ all of them have this story from last year and they see this art as a way to enshrine or commemorate that season. People are buying them as gifts for those impacted by the wildfire season,” Macauley said.
"The art starts a conversation," he said. “I've been in forestry in B.C. all my life… so anytime people go outside and see something in nature, or even the fires that happen themselves, they’re all great ways to have conversations about the natural systems that we’re surrounded in.”
READ MORE: B.C. is now well into its third worst wildfire season in the last 18 years
In the past, he’s done wood carving and other home projects but it wasn’t until he connected his woodworking interest with the artist print process that his side project became a side hustle.
“It just seemed like the perfect marriage of interest. Along with the connection to the forest, and the storytelling, all of these things converged and it seemed like the right pursuit for who I am,” he said.
To connect with Macauley, visit his Instagram page here.
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