Wildfires - and their impact on our lives and psyches - are growing in intensity and frequency. However, the sensationalism of most news coverage fails to explore the nuances and complexities of evacuee’s inner experiences.

In 2020, I had to abandon my home, running through the night for safety as streaks of dry lighting hit the surrounding hilltops. I wasn’t allowed to return for three weeks.

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Schrödinger's Cat is a 1935 quantum mechanics thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrodinger in conversation with Einstein. In it, a hypothetical cat - trapped inside an opaque box with a flask of poison - is considered to be both alive and dead, simultaneously.

This “dual state” continues until you look inside the box. Only by looking, can you resolve the reality.

Until that moment, the cat is considered both alive and dead. Not possibly dead or possibly alive, but alive and dead at the same time.

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This series explores the experience between evacuation and return, a time when your mind thrashes about, reaching for solid certainty in a sea of the unknowable. In an era known as “The Information Age,” this not-knowing was particularly uncomfortable. For weeks on end, having to simultaneously hold two realities - "alive" and "dead" - for something as intimate, foundational, and personal as home was both excruciating and fascinating. It broke and rebuilt my sense for how we construct and accept reality. Unable to look inside the box, my mind was forced to bend in unnatural ways, unable to rest - as we are so accustomed to - in just one reality.

In this series, I explore the surreal duality of those days, blending the mundane details of everyday life with the cataclysmic drama of disaster, feelings of hope with the crushing weight of loss, magical thinking with sobering truths, and even some humor amidst all the tragedy.