Kyle Scheurmann: On the Ashes of Wet Cedar

For his inaugural solo exhibition with Bau-Xi Vancouver, Falling Stars Made of Ashes, Kyle Scheurmann explains the origin of his use of old growth cedar shard ashes in his images of fire, offering a sobering and visceral description of old growth logging and how the cedar shards he collected for this purpose came to be. Falling Stars Made of Ashes opens on September 14 at Bau-Xi Vancouver's Upper Gallery and runs through September 28, 2024.

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When I got to Eden Camp, living on the side of a logging road, we burned wet cedar. It was what we had around. There’s so much of it in the clearcuts, it’s easy to scavenge. I’d take my truck up the Bugaboo road and load up the back with scraps, planks and shards pulled out of the clearcuts. It will always be strange to me to burn pieces of an ancient, old-growth tree. Some of those cedars we were burning could have been over 1000 years old. But it’s what we had.

When an ancient cedar is cut down, it often explodes when it hits the ground. The older a cedar gets, the more hollow and delicate it becomes. There’s even a common but sinister logging practice of felling the ancient cedars first, knowing they will explode into shards and create a cushy bed on the forest floor. This makes for a soft landing spot to then fell the more lucrative lumber on top of - the fir and the hemlock and the alder. These exploded cedar shards and scraps were often what we were collecting and burning at camp.

Kyle Scheurmann, Falling Stars Made of Ashes. Oil and cedar ashes on linen, 36 x 24 inches

Ancient trees aren’t supposed to burn. They’re fire-resistant, in part because of how much moisture they retain. Tree farms of second growth trees burn fast, as their monoculture ecologies operate like matchsticks on a mountainside. Thin, thatchy, dry and bundled. The “Main Natural Disturbance” (a fancy conservationist term I recently learned) of a second growth forest is wildfire. But the "Main Natural Disturbance" of an ancient forest is actually wind. This isn’t to say that ancient forests aren’t burning - because second growth fires nearby can still spread to an ancient forest. But in most cases, ancient forests serve as natural fire buffers. More old-growth forests would mean less fire.

But when all you have to burn to stay warm is ancient wet cedar, you learn to make do.

On one of my last days at Eden, I took some of those ancient wet cedar shards home with me. We had a good pile of it freshly cut down into burning or boardwalk-building size. So when we got word one morning that RCMP might be right around the corner, we started throwing all the usable camp materials into my truck before the police could raid the camp and confiscate our stuff.

The RCMP never did show up that morning, but I’d already driven all the way back to Shawnigan Lake with ancient wet cedar in the truck-bed. However… within a week, the RCMP did raid Eden Camp, and all our camp infrastructure was lost. There was nothing to go back to.

Three weeks after that, I moved to Northwestern Ontario, where I am now based. I took those wet cedar shards from Eden with me.

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The first time I made a painting of a wildfire in my new studio, I knew I wanted to include ash in it. I’d been doing some tests of a subtle, symbolic application of ash in the paint, experimenting with crushing up the ash as fine as possible, then sifting all the chunks out of it to make a smooth, shiny painting medium.

The process worked! It worked so well, that I’ve replicated it a few times now. Crushing then sifting the ash. Whipping it slowly and selectively into the paint. Careful not to overdo it. Instead of applying the ash to large areas of the surface, I started looking for more selective areas to include it in, such as in the plumes of smoke or in the already-burned and blackened tree trunks. 

The show I’m painting for you now has grown like a crescendo, just as all my recent exhibitions seem to do. They start out with an intention, but by the time I’m working on the final pieces, the very act of painting has revealed meaning in ways I could never have expected. I talk about this in my artist statement:
“There weren’t supposed to be any fires in this new exhibition…”

But here we are, Falling Stars Made of Ashes. A reflective, meditative consideration of the state of our land and our people as seen through my dreams and memories.

Kyle Scheurmann, A Few Stars in the River. Oil and cedar ashes on linen, 36 x 48 inches

The painting above is the view from the bridge at Eden Camp, overlooking the Gordon River. I’m paddling towards uncertainty with only A Few Stars in the River to light the way.

Ash is carefully, selectively, symbolically mixed into the stars, into the colour of the water, and into the plumes of smoke on the horizon.

The ash is Eden.

Ash made from shards of ancient trees pulled from the very clearcut mountainside I’ve painted.

Once-wet-cedar from the very place I first learned that making a painting might actually help save the forest.

-Kyle Scheurmann, 2024