Hold Over Fires
Hold Over Fires invites you to sit with grief—ecological, personal and collective—as it smolders beneath the surface, awaiting a spark. Centered in the intimate realities of fire and loss, this immersive space calls you to move, touch, and reflect.
As you walk through, feel the materials shift, breathe, and settle with you—like a wildfire's ghostly embers, there is no clear end, only a continual process of transformation. Join us in exploring what we carry, what we let go, and what it means to hold space for grief in this fiery world.
The Artist in Residence program at posAbilities offers employees the opportunity to dedicate some of their work hours to pursuing an artistic practice. The program aims to build a creative community both within posAbilities and with the broader community, promote diversity, inclusion, and social change, and explore themes of identity and the relationship between self and others, particularly in the context of care, work, and belonging. It also seeks to foster beauty, meaning, and joy in the workplace and community, while encouraging engagement with community members.
From January to May 2025, Stephanie Koenig, posAbilities' Artist in Residence, is collaborating with Gillian Der, a member of the ArtRise Collective, to create an immersive art show. Drawing on their unique skills and backgrounds as a death doula and a wildfire geographer, they will invite participants to confront the existential grief of the climate crisis. The exhibit, Hold Over Fires, engages the senses, encouraging participants to interact with the materials through touch, movement, and stillness, much like the captivating and transformative nature of fire itself.
We invite you to join us and explore the show in some of these ways:
Independently during the times Alternatives Gallery is open from April 21st - May 2nd ( Monday to Friday 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM)
By Attending a participatory experience led by the artist in which they will co-create a landscape of stories of loss, on Thursday April 24th from 7:00 - 8:30 PM
For a gathering and Q & A session with the artists on Saturday, April 26th from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. Light refreshments will be provided.
About the show
A holdover fire is the term used to describe the phenomenon when a wildfire burns deep under the ground living amongst the decomposed organic matter, reducing itself to an untraceable winter dormancy until it rises to the surface to burn again. As prolonged drought and diminished snowpack continue to worsen these ghostly fires are becoming more frequent. Hold Over Fires wonders what wildfire might teach us about personal grief and vice versa. Hold Over Fires peaks through the smoke of grief to sit with ecological and personal losses wondering if they might not be the same things.
The ability of Stephanie & Gillian to craft a space to engage with these tender moments of reckoning is buoyed by their decade long friendship asking or perhaps demonstrating, how we might hold together as a community of witnesses to the ongoing grief of climate catastrophe. They turn to their audience asking, what do we keep and what do we choose to lay to rest as we witness this fiery world in the process of becoming?
Hold Over Fires invites death and catastrophe in, shedding a light on the losses we often carry in silence.
Grief, like wildfire, is never finished.
This work was produced and presented on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as well as the unceded territories of the St’át’imc Nation.
About the Artists
Stephanie Koenig is a multidisciplinary maker who’s works explores the connections between community, grief and future dreaming. As a designer,artist and future Death Doula, her work often asks questions like; what is holding you back from truly getting to know one another? How do we hold space for our individual and collective grief while also envisioning a better future. She is incredibly excited to work alongside Gillian, a long time friend, and first time artistic collaborator! This show offers her a unique opportunity: to explore grief and loss while also preparing to welcome a new life into the world.
Gillian Der 謝美華 is an artist as of two minutes ago but more comfortably sits on the couch under the less flashy titles of knitter, fiber crafter, and when she gets to it (thesis) writer. Perpetually loving and inevitably grieving one thing or another, Gillian’s work contemplates what it means to be here, in this moment on this land, often through lenses of coloniality, racialization, and disability. This body of work has become a cumulative piece for her MA Geography where she is contending with the 2023 Downton Lake Wildfire’s effects on community and landscape in the Bridge River Valley, St’át’imc Territory. After a walk in the burnt woods with Steph holding a camera and Gillian holding some baskets she couldn’t stop making that research into art. Don’t ask her how just yet but she’s pretty sure it’s all connected.