Kyle Scheurmann: A Lament for Sassin

For his highly anticipated upcoming solo exhibition We Could Have Been a Mountain, Kyle Scheurmann holds his focus on the urgency of attention to old-growth forests, offering pages from his July 15, 2025 journal entry onsite at the remains of Sassin camp, Ditidaht First Nation territory, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Sheurmann details sobering discoveries about BC’s forest fires and articulates the engulfing heartbreak caused by the loss of Sassin and the life the forest once sustained.

Kyle Scheurmann gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

We Could Have Been a Mountain officially opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver's Main Level Gallery on April 11 and runs through April 28, 2026.

Kyle Scheurmann, We Could Have Been a Mountain. 50 x 66 inches, unframed. Sand, Ashes, and Oil on Linen, 2025

___

July 15, 2025

The hardest thing I’ve had to learn in all my years working on the frontline is that sometimes the forests you love the most might not be there the next time you return. Sometimes, loving a forest requires a patience that you know will extend well beyond your lifetime. 
Sometimes loving a forest means planting a seed.

So over the last three years, I’ve gone back to Sassin each summer to do exactly that - to plant a seed and be patient. To show the forest that I still love it and that I’m grateful for all that it has given me. And that just like purple and yellow flowers do, we can continue to grow together with the help of each other.

I just didn’t expect this summer’s visit to be so difficult…

–

At first, I thought it was lightning. 

Where there once was a slash pile, now there was a massive, black, smouldering hole in the earth. Giant decomposing cedar torsos were half-charred and opened to the sun. The soil in the centre was charred too, right down to the rocks. I immediately took a left turn off the road and began to scale the side of the mountain to get close, jumping from log to log.

Later hiking a bit further up the road, I found another one. Except this time, the slash pile was only half cooked, clearly burning from the inside out.

Up the road a bit more, another. And then another. At least a dozen or more slash piles all in various states of burn. There’s no way that lightning would have struck the same clearcut so many times in one season. There’s also no way that humans made these fires, unless they first burrowed into the middle of the slash piles to ignite them from the inside out.

Fire was cutting holes deep into Sassin.

Sometimes on the prairies near where I grew up, farmers would leave big piles of grass and weeds in the middle of fields to rot. When the rot got heavy and hot enough in the summer, the piles would catch on fire. They would spontaneously self-combust.

In the clearcut at Sassin, I am sure that this is what I was witnessing - just with ancient trees instead of harvest grasses.

Hopeful, small saplings from seeds I’d previously planted were now keeled over and desaturated in the heat as Sassin literally spontaneously self-combusted in the sun.

…And the news still wonders where all these forest fires seem to come from…

The tallest slash pile in Sassin must be 4 or 5 storeys tall. It’s an impossibly grotesque pyre brimming with entire tree bodies, root systems pulled out like nerve endings, branches dislocated from languid limbs and splinters cut like jagged teeth. I’ve climbed up it in past summers to get a better look at the carnage left behind in the valley and with the new addition of the self-combustion to view across the expanse, this summer would be no different. But if I had known how much more difficult the climb would be this time around, I might have thought differently before starting the ascent. 

Because just like the rest of them, this giant slash pile was spontaneously combusting too.

Just off the road and a few metres past a row of fireweed, I stepped up onto the first of the wide cedars in the pile and felt it melt below my feet. The whole mound let out a deep groan from well within its centre, but I kept going. Spanning my legs as wide as I could across to the next cedar, and then to a fir, and then back to another cedar. As my weight compacted the slash pile into its cavernous burnt-out core, plumes of smoke shot up around my legs. I looked down into the blackened holes cutting pits into the fragile heart of the mound of dead tree parts all around me. 

With each careful step, I worried more about falling through to the chambered centre of the burning slash pile. But I kept going, stuffing my pockets with chunks of charred debris; some burnt branches, some petrified bark, some brittle and blackened bone from a deer left dead in the pile too. And I thought about the people who were responsible for this devastation. Loggers, RCMP, bureaucrats and politicians. Would they be brave enough to climb this slash pile and face what they’ve done?

But by the time I made it to the top, my mind turned to the people I’d stood beside as part of this beautiful resistance. I thought about the Forest Protectors who climbed tripods or locked into sleeping dragons in order to stop things like this from happening. Just a few kilometres to the south, a new blockade was beginning to take shape in front of a forest equally as old and rare as the slash pile at Sassin I was now perched atop of. 

Kyle Scheurmann, Slash Pile. 50 x 72 inches, unframed. Reclaimed Iron Oxide, Charred Bones, Fireweed Flowers, Sand, Burnt Ancient Cedar from Sassin, and Oil on Linen, 2025

And I thought about the first Forest Protector I ever painted. They were an unnamed person from my very first days at camp. Somebody who was meant to be a representative of all of us. Standing in a creek with their back to the clearcut, they literally held what was left of the forest in their outstretched arms.

A few more feet forward, I found as sturdy of a cedar limb as I’d stepped on yet. 

I planted both of my feet, found my balance and as one more plume of smoke shot out from the slash pile under me like a Steller’s Jay, I extended both of my arms to what was left of the forest and held on tight… quietly whispering, “I love you.”

-Kyle Scheurmann

The artist at work documenting the at-risk forests in Pacheedaht territory, Vancouver Island. Photo: Film still from A Beautiful Resistance, LGR Productions/Lachlan Ross, 2025.


WATCH KYLE SCHEURMANN'S SHORT DOCUMENTARY "A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE"