Hot and Bothered

2025
Hand-pulled silkscreen / environmental data
Limited editions
Hot and Bothered is a series of hand-pulled silkscreen prints generated from climate and weather data associated with recent wildfires in Canada and around the world.
Each work begins with recorded environmental conditions that are abstracted into the organic, cloud-like forms recurring throughout my practice. Through silkscreen, those forms are separated, layered and recombined using transparent, metallic and luminous inks.
The printing process became integral to the work. Transparent colours shift where they overlap; metallic surfaces respond to changing light; individual layers obscure and alter what sits beneath them. The information is still present, but its appearance depends on how it is layered and encountered.
The resulting prints are intentionally seductive. Bright colour, shimmer and playful forms sit in uncomfortable contrast with their source material: wildfires in places including Kelowna, Jasper, Los Angeles and Evros, Greece.
That contradiction reflects a broader question within my practice: how do we perceive environmental events when they reach us through layers of information, imagery and spectacle?
We routinely encounter catastrophe through screens—filtered, cropped, repeated and placed alongside advertising, entertainment and everyday distraction. Something devastating can become visually spectacular, briefly hold our attention, and then disappear beneath the next image.
Hot and Bothered uses beauty in much the same way. The prints invite viewers closer through colour, luminosity and surface before revealing the environmental events embedded within them.
Rather than illustrating wildfire, the series uses data and abstraction to explore the distance between knowing something is happening and truly absorbing what it means.