This body of a work is a collection of pieces made using an experimental process-based technique developed using gunpowder and various smoke recipes combined with different masking technique. I call this process “smoke alchemy”. While at first it might seem unusual to use gunpowder and smoke to create artworks, this practice actually goes back to the precise origins of the material itself: invented as a substance to create visual ideas by way of fire and smoke in the sky. Alchemy, at its core, is the practice of taking an existing thing and rearranging it to create something that wasn’t there before. 

There are a few levels of transformation here I find particularly interesting: conceptually, it is taking what is traditionally understood as an “implement of violence” and turning it into a tool for healing (from a means of destruction to a thing to create with); and materially, that of directly converting the ephemeral phenomena of combustion and its associated smoke into a lasting stable image on archival paper.