Biography
Sasha Michelle White is an artist, ecologist, and interdisciplinary researcher who centers embodied engagements with plants—drawing and observing, burning and propagating, processing into dyes and medicines—as vital knowledge practices. Sasha studied printmaking and book arts at Bowdoin College, Maine College of Art, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has held fellowships at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned a master’s degree in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon in 2021 and is a founding member of the Fuel Ladder art research group, and as a Mellon Foundation predoctoral fellow with the Confluence Lab, developed the inaugural Artists-In-Fire residency. Currently a PhD candidate in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho, her dissertation project, Finding Fire's Form, investigates the aesthetic ecologies of fire-adapted shrubs.
Burning at Coyote Prairie, 2018. Photo of the artist: Paul Gordon
Artist Statement
I begin with and continually return to the ways in which our ecological, social, and material landscapes layer. I engage plants in manual, material, and often labor-intensive practices that require attentiveness to biological cycles of growth and change alongside accumulations of fraught social histories. Living in the fire-prone landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, these practices necessarily entail fire.
That fire is destructive is self-evident: the match burns down to our fingers, the forest disappears into an ash-laden expanse of blackened snags, the neighborhood becomes smoke and rubble. But by asking instead what fire generates and reinforces, I seek to make sensible the aspects of fire that the spectacle of flame and the narrative of fire as emergency obscure. Where the post-fire landscape is commonly perceived as wasteland, I seek out meshworks of social and ecological relationships in the dye colors of shrubs, in the medicines of herbs, in the rhythms of stewardship and suppression, in the patterns of fire regimes.
Attending to the colors, substances, and forms of a fire-prone landscape, made tangible through drawing, writing, sewing, dyeing, I expand the material and temporal scale of fire from isolated event to recurring—and often beneficial—relationship. Like fire, my practice ignores the confines of the disciplinary and seeks to ask questions in the overlays of the artistic and the scientific, the material and the energetic, the ecological and the social. As we face accumulating crises of climate, health, and technology, my practice asks what and who needs to be made sensible and how.
