In Alexis Joy Hagestad’s new solo exhibition, viewers can walk through a fictional burned forest, watch a video with a fire map of the western United States and listen to trees moving and creaking in the wind.

“This Forest Remembers Fire” not only explores the effects of fire suppression in the United States in the face of climate change, but it also allows the School of Art graduate student to reflect on the death of her beloved grandmother in 2017, when Hagestad started working as a seasonal worker in Montana battling wildland fires.

“Fire can be remembered in forest ecosystems as both a destructive force and a catalyst for renewal,” said Hagestad, part of the school’s highly ranked Photography, Video and Imaging program. “I wanted to create a space where people can reflect on fire’s dual nature and how grief — a feeling we all experience as humans — is also part of the lives of other species within our ecosystem.”

Hagestad (she, they) received the school’s 2024 Marcia Grand Centennial Sculpture Prize, which provides an MFA-seeking student with up to $10,000 to support completion of work in the sculptural/3D arts. The annual award is sponsored by Grand, a generous donor who funded the First Year Experience program and other school renovations.

“This Forest Remembers Fire” — on display at the Lionel Rombach Gallery from March 18 to April 18 — features Hagestad’s photographs of isolated, burned tree structures printed on kozo paper and arranged to allow viewers to walk through the space, resembling a forest.

The installation also features a zine and a video. The zine explores two realities, one where a wildfire has just happened and the other many years after a wildfire. The video presents a fire map created from satellite images of fires that have occurred over the years in the western United States.

The map also includes an audio element: the sounds of trees moving and creaking in the wind, captured using contact microphones. “When layered together, the audio resembles the sound of fire, which I found interesting in the context of a forest remembering fire,” Hagestad said.

Family influence

Growing up in Missoula, Montana, Hagestad witnessed fire season every summer.

“Smoke was constantly present,” she said, so much that it burned her eyes and diffused the sun, transforming the landscape by making it darker.

Her stepfather, Dan Martin, introduced her mother, Monica Martin, to wildland firefighting. Hagestad followed in their footsteps and joined the wildfire effort after graduating with a BFA in Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia in 2016.

Her parents own Aries Fire Service, a fire suppression and fuels mitigation company in Florence, Montana. Hagestad’s maternal grandmother, Mary Wasson, went back to school at the University of Montana and received a degree in criminology after her husband died in 1993, working at a YWCA battered women’s shelter until she retired to spend more time with her grandchildren.

“After the death of my grandmother, to whom I was very close, wildland fire and the community involved in wildfire became a space for me to grieve,” Hagestad said. “And in the wildfire community, you meet some of the best folks around.

“As I worked through my initial grief of losing her and look back on those moments now, I realize that it was just what I needed. Being in that field and engaging in the labor and demands of the job helped me understand myself better and the person I was becoming after her passing. Grief changes you, and I felt like I was growing into a whole new person, a person shaped by her death.”

Thoughtful installation

School of Art Galleries Director lydia see, who helped advise Hagestad during the planning of “This Forest Remembers Fire,” was not only impressed with the grad student’s knowledge of wildfires but also with her sense of empathy.

“Alexis has approached this installation thoughtfully, with deep reverence for the subject matter and keen attention to the experience of the gallery visitor,” see said. “I’m excited for this iteration to be on view in a controlled setting, and then to be pushed outside the gallery walls in other forms in the future.”

Hagestad’s photographic prints depict the trees as isolated forms and stripped of their original locations. “Therefore, they could exist anywhere,” she said.

Meanwhile, the fire map’s images in the video overlay one another to form a new map that visualizes the history of the fires. A red line on the map represents the fire boundary, an average derived from actual fire boundaries combined with online data. “The map was inspired by an Introduction to Cartography class that I took last spring in the School of Geography,” Hagestad said.

Although she admits being “no expert or scientist in the field,” Hagestad said her time working in the wildland — and her childhood spent exploring public lands and national parks with her mom and sister — had a major influence on her artistic research.

“Wildfires are dangerous, especially as homes encroach on natural areas, leading to devastating impacts on communities,” the photographer said. “However, there is such a thing as beneficial and good fire. Indigenous peoples used fire to manage their lands before colonization. Many cultural burning practices were banned after colonization, and suppression became the policy.

“Many researchers in the field realize now that reintroducing Indigenous fire management practices is essential for healthy ecosystems, and using controlled burns can help clear underbrush and promote specific plant growth. These burns can help save our forests from catastrophic wildfires.

“This is also one of the reasons why I decided to title my show, ‘This Forest Remembers Fire’ — because it does. Fire, metaphorically speaking, is written in some forests’ DNA. Just as fire and grief are written in our DNA as human beings, to be human is to experience grief, a feeling we all share no matter our upbringing.”

Growing as an artist

At an early age, Hagestad said her mother “taught us the importance of the natural world” and how “being connected to nature is essential to being human.”

At Big Sky High School in Missoula, Hagestad said three teachers helped push her to grow as an artist and a writer: art instructor Dan Degrandpre, who also taught Hagestad’s mom years before; the late Lorilee Evans-Lynn, a literary magazine adviser; and R. David Wilson, a Spanish teacher who also is an artist. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without them,” she said.

At the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Hagestad learned the importance of creating conceptual projects, which gave her “a great foundation in photography,” she said while praising faculty members Tom Fischer, Zig Jackson, Craig Stevens, Rebecca Nolan and Jacklyn Cori Norman.

In pursuing her MFA, Hagestad chose the University of Arizona School of Art after being impressed by previous and current students in the program and the faculty, including Sama Alshaibi, Ellen McMahon, Yana Payusova, Marcos Serafim, Martina Shenal, David Taylor and Cerese Vaden, along with see. “Their guidance and support have profoundly shaped my voice as an artist.”

“I came to the U of A because I wanted to be part of an artistic community,” Hagestad said. “I’m thankful to have such an amazing and supportive cohort of peers. I genuinely do not know what I’d do without them.”

After earning her MFA, Hagestad hopes to teach at the college level but also to “continue discovering my voice as an artist and keep creating and growing.”

In the meantime, she hopes the people who see her exhibition reflect on how fire plays a vital role in healing ecosystems.

“Learning to co-exist with good fire will ultimately benefit us and the future of our ecosystems,” Hagestad said. “I hope the audience can walk through this fictional forest and recognize that their own grief — whether it stems from the loss of a loved one or ecological concerns — does not make them alone in their healing journey.

“Just as a forest takes many years to renew after a wildfire, so do our personal healing journeys as we navigate our feelings of grief.”