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ReKindle, a collaboration between FishDog Farm and ArtBuilds, was featured as the 2026 Fern Burn Temple in Walton, OR. It was built from Douglas fir logs that once stood as part of a tightly established monoculture—dense trees grown in uniform rows, planted to be pulled from the earth solely for profit. But their fate was altered. Rather than clearcutting the stand and leaving behind a bald, barren landscape devoid of life, a healthy number of trees were kept to seed a new ecosystem: a silvopasture, an intensively managed ecology that integrates trees, forage, and fauna to maximize ecological benefits. With the thinning, light returned to warm the soil, carbon-sequestering native grasses emerged from seeds planted by land stewards, and livestock moved through the awakened space again—hooves turning the earth, leaving behind nature’s favorite fertilizer. The logs removed to restore the land are gathered here, not as waste, but as form.
The shape of the sculpture resembles the fires we have gathered around for more than 400,000 years. Open and skeletal, it is a place of gathering, relating, and the passing on of knowledge. Fire is one of our oldest tools: a mark of ingenuity and our ability to transform raw materials into resourceful objects of human utility. Yet, without the passing on of wisdom, without community, without balance, our instinctual drive toward progress runs rampant, an extractive chain reaction.
ReKindle sits within that contradiction, asking what it means to build in relationship, and if we can do so without being inherently destructive.
Set against the backdrop of a whispering creek and nestled into a wall of ferns, ReKindle invites visitors to enter the structure, to rest above on its platform—milled on-site from the very trees that once stood here—and to rekindle a fire within, asking themselves what it means to be human and what energy they might contribute to the collective ecology while they’re still here, spinning around a thousand miles an hour on a spherical petri dish hurling through a boundless, immersive black.
Keeping with the traditional temple ritual, at the end of Fern Burn ReKindle was burned. The carbon hidden inside its woody cells underwent a primal, unstoppable reaction into CO2 and ash, contributing to a changing climate externally and within—a symbol of our imperfection and our shackles to an endless cycle still unfolding.
