To Ashes
And so we return to the work. This piece was originally inspired by a question from one of my classmates in response to the work From Dust previously discussed on this blog. The question was "why don't you use ash?" I know it may seem like a simple question, but the concept of the blackened phoenix rising from flames became a burning image in my psyche (no pun intended.) I was consumed with it, because fire is perhaps one of the most immediate and irreversible forms of degradation and corrosion that exists. I was immediately faced with two problems. The first was how to get something that was burning to resemble a raven, the second was, quite simply, the actual burning. I was not afraid of using the symbolism of the phoenix in place of the raven for this image, though I was a little sad to be straying from the original concept so early. But I knew that I wanted the imagery to separate from the background, and flame being a light source (emitting instead of reflecting)