Fire North: Book One
Fire North: Book One is a long-term photographic project by Alan McFetridge, made in response to the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada. Bringing together field photography, satellite imagery, essays and community testimony, the book reflects on landscape fire, climate change, public memory and the boreal forest.
My blood is related to them, 2016 © Alan McFetridge. From Fire North: Book One, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
Project Statement:
Fire North: Book One is a photographic monograph on the aftermath of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, one of the most significant urban wildfires in modern Canadian history.
Working in the boreal landscape of northern Alberta after the evacuation, Alan McFetridge brings together large-format photography, satellite imagery, essays and community testimony to examine how fire reshapes land, memory and public life.
The book turns away from the spectacle of burning and attends instead to what remains: roads, forests, neighbourhood edges, snow, ash, regrowth and the traces of return. Fire North is both a record of a community altered by fire and a wider meditation on the place of fire in the twenty-first century.
Book Details
Format: Large-format hardback volume
Size: 310 × 245 mm, portrait
Extent: Approximately 276 pages
Contents: Photography, satellite imagery, essays and community testimony
Plates: 140 full-colour plates
Exhibition Prints
Selected works from Fire North are produced as large-scale exhibition prints on museum-grade cotton rag with baryta and wax coating, presented without glass to preserve the material surface of the image.
Alan McFetridge, My sorrow comes at dawn, 2017
1920mm x 1610 mm x 70mm.
Chroma Print - Museum Grade Cotton Rag with Baryta & Wax Coating. No Glass.
© Alan McFetridge
Project Gallery
Selected works from Fire North: Book One and related exhibition prints.
Size: 960mm x 1200mm
Chroma Print - Museum Grade Cotton Rag with Baryta & Wax Coating
Frame: Scorched plywood sealed with tung oil.
Related Project: On The Line, 2019.
On The Line is the first book to emerge from Alan McFetridge’s Fort McMurray fieldwork. The first edition is no longer available for purchase, but the project remains part of the wider Fire North archive.
On the Line - 1st Print Edition
Photographs and Words by Alan McFetridge
Embossed soft cover with sewn cotton binding
11 colour photographs
H: 394mm x W: 330mm
16 pages
Design by Duncan Whyte
ISBN 978-1-9164729-0-7
Published by Here Sue
Edition of 1000
To support the publication and community return of Fire North: Book One through print sales, please contact the studio.
Alan McFetridge, On The Line, 2019
Photographic book from the wider Fire North project, made after fieldwork in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
© Alan McFetridge
Wedge Gallery, Sydney | Exhibition, 2019
The International Marianne Brandt Award centres around the role of poetics and functionality. The 8th Triennial Award asked artists and designers how that which connects us with other living beings and habitats that can be newly discovered and designed. As they were seeking projects with cooperative, aesthetic, metaphorical, and poetic exchanging relationships with other organisms and natural existences. We felt it would be an excellent exercise to present part of the Song of the Dead work to the Jury.
I Am Weary of the Poets, 2017 © Alan McFetridge
Earth Day Reflections
You can read more about how we approach the work we do through a framework that centres not only on the well-being of the planet we call home but also on the multitude of people whose perspectives are missing from institutionalised thinking.
For further information on this project please contact the Studio
All images © Alan McFetridge