Name: Painting with what remains of the Kingston fire
Uploaded: 2026-01-01T14:42:33.456Z
Duration: 3 min 8 s
Description: After visual artist Joanne Cole lost her backyard studio in the Kingston fire over the summer, she also lost decades of invaluable artwork and material. Now, she’s painting with the ashes of what’s been left behind.

After visual artist Joanne Cole lost her backyard studio in the Kingston fire over the summer, she also lost decades of invaluable artwork and material. Now, she’s painting with the ashes of what’s been left behind.

Kingston

Joanne Cole, a visual artist from Western Bay, lost her art studio and thirty years' worth of work in the Kingston wildfire of 2025. Despite the devastation, Cole found inspiration in the landscape's transformation, gathering materials like clay and burnt twigs left behind by the fire to incorporate into her new artwork.

Cole describes her creative process as a form of recovery, using the altered environment as both subject and medium. She plans to rebuild her studio and views this period as a new beginning, symbolizing resilience and the potential for regrowth after loss.

Painting with what remains of the Kingston fire

My name is Joanne Cole. I live in Western Bay on the Conception Bay North Shore. I'm a visual artist and I lost my art studio in the Kingston wildfire of 2025. It's sort of a diary of... It was a bit surreal at first. Well, first I had to deal with all the blackness that was around me driving through and seeing other people's houses just totally burnt to the ground. Yeah, I was just so grateful to see the house and I walked up to where the studio was and it was just unrecognisable. Nothing at all salvageable. Thirty years' worth of artwork. Sketchbooks. Well, just everything, everything in there. The flatsome and the jetsome that artists collect over the years. You know, shells and driftwood and metal things. But then I thought, you know, I can still paint. And just something came over me that I just got to put this behind me now and move on. When I finished looking at the studio in ruins, I kind of looked around the landscape and amongst all the dark, the dark ground and the rocks, I seen these big orange mounds and I realised that they were anthills. When I was looking at the clay, looking down on it, it was really soft and fine and I thought, you know, maybe I could make paint out of this or use it in my artwork because it's what's left after the fire and we all have to go on after the fire. So it's kind of symbolic in a way. And then all the sticks on the ground, all the burnt twigs. So I started gathering those things. As an artist, I look at things in shapes and patterns and colour and it really struck me about all the rocks that were underneath the vegetation that had suddenly appeared. The blackened trees and the contrast between the ground and sometimes the sky. The way the light shines on the trees now is different. It just looks so haunting and desolate. That kind of speaks to me. For me, it's a recovery. It's being able to live here again. I'm just surrounded by blackness here because I have no close neighbours and everything around me burnt. So I've decided I've got to work with these elements and create something that comes from my heart. It's just a way of recovery and looking at regrowth. I'm going to regrow and have a new studio and possibly a new beginning with my artwork. Well, this is a new beginning, what I'm doing now. But after this, who knows where this will lead to because one thing leads into the other with my artwork and life as well.

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