24-page book170mm × 250mm, graphite and ink, digital color and printed newsprint.

Wheat paste vignettesVarious sizes, paper, ink

Artist Statement:

This account began with fire — not as metaphor, but as lived experience. After experiencing a house fire, I moved west to New Mexico, where I watched wildfires burn across the horizon, close enough to feel their impact, far enough to only witness. As part of the Disturbance cohort, I looked closely at how fire reshapes ecosystems and communities alike: the fraught necessity of prescribed burns, the loss that reorders a landscape's memory. This work moves between personal narrative and ecological observation, tracing fire as both destroyer and renewer — an experience I lived through, then watched happen to the land around me.

Artist Bio:

Rachel Briggs is an illustrator, designer and visual artist whose work explores narrative through drawing and visual storytelling. Working between illustration and contemporary image-making, her practice often begins with daily sketchbooks and close observation of place, community, and environment.

In 2022, Briggs relocated to northern New Mexico after being displaced by a house fire. Living in a desert region shaped by wildfire deepened her interest in how ecological events shape communities, memory, and place. Her recent work reflects these experiences, using illustration as a way to process, document, and narrate lived environments.

Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration, and she was selected for the 2021 class of the Recording Academy. Briggs has worked independently as a designer and illustrator since 2012, creating work for editorial, civic, and commercial clients while maintaining an active studio practice. She previously taught in the design and illustration departments at Watkins College of Art (now part of Belmont University).

Scientists Statement:

REGENERATION(rih-jen-uh-rey-shuhn)

A burned forest does not simply return. It must reestablish. Scientists call this process “regeneration.”

For many conifer forests, regeneration begins with seed. Surviving trees must produce seeds, those seeds must reach the burned area, and some must land where temperature, moisture, soil, and light is just right for them to germinate. The resulting seedlings then have to survive their most vulnerable years before they can become established trees.

Each step can become a bottleneck.

Fire severity matters as well because large patches of tree mortality can leave seedlings far from living seed sources. Weather matters because germination and survival depend on moisture arriving at the right time. Competition, soil conditions, topography, and exposure all influence which seedlings persist. Increasingly hot and dry conditions can further reduce the chance that a seedling survives long enough to become part of the next forest.

Grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs may quickly occupy a burn scar even where tree seedlings are scarce. In some places, forest regeneration can be quick with aspen resprouting, or it may take decades as trees slowly establish through time. In other places, what returns may look nothing like what was there before.

Regeneration is therefore not the reversal of disturbance. It is the uncertain process that follows it.

And regeneration does not always mean the return of a familiar forest. In some places, changing climate and disturbance may push a landscape toward something different—a shrubland, grassland, or another community better suited to the conditions that now exist. That new ecosystem may hold its own forms of beauty and abundance, but it may also function differently, changing what the landscape provides and asking the people who depend on it to adapt as well.

PHOTOS BY ALEX CANCRO