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Image series of abandoned fire places found on wild land of the UK and Austria.

I am intrigued by these abandoned fire places I come across, that seem to speak of unnoticed things, ancient traces made visible.

They reveal our 400,000 year fascination, our need, to be with fire, to make it ourselves, to shape the hearth with our hands, a ring of stones, a dug hollow in the earth, shaped until we are content, the wood gathered, kindling made, the fire breathed into life and carefully tended… the ancient ritual has important process, and these traces reveal our unique attention and familiarity with them.

And there is the location, the place of the fire, where we choose to locate this ritual, by rivers, in forest clearings, under a grand tree, a beach with a view. Wild places. And set with an aspect, vantage point, or sense of shelter. Again, important parts of this fire ritual process with which, as modern domesticated humans we remain instinctively familiar with. We know how we want the fire and place to be.

We wish to be in the wild. To be away from the civilised. And under cover of night we are not contained by the permissions or requirements of civilisation, we are in touch with something deeper, older, that needs to live in us. The wild.

Despite how little connection we have to the distant traditions of our indigenous ancestry, somehow, we still have desire, need, to make a fire place and gather, sit, cook and gaze into a wild fire. Almost as if upholding an unrecognised ancient lineage, a part of ourselves that needs to be known, re-wilded, and cannot be left to fade.