Research Profile: Gillian Der - Emotional landscapes and a culturally informed geography of wildfire

Wandering through a charred landscape with incense and food offerings in hand, Gillian Der (謝美華 ) searches for the long-lost family memorial site. Among the blackened tree trunks and returning grasses emerging from the rocky earth, she finds the place to set down her offerings and begin the grave sweeping ceremony. This recently scorched forest, site of the 2023 Downtown Lake wildfire in the Bridge River Valley (BVR), traditional St’át’imc territory, is a place of multilayered grief, personal and ecological. Visiting this landscape, finding a family grave, and walking through grief with a deep cultural practice is a way of finding solace in the chaos.

A second year UBC Human Geography Masters student, Der draws on her Chinese Canadian heritage to explore concepts of grieving in the face the climate crisis and asks what a culturally informed geography of wildfire might look like. From creative nonfiction, to felting and performance art, Der weaves together a rich fabric of unconventional research practices that aim to highlight the emotional landscapes often overlooked in the field of geography. With an arts-based, community-engaged research practice, Der hosted focus groups and felting workshops in the BRV to help residents make sense of their experiences.

“Wildfire is not just scientific or geographic process – it is an incredibly emotional experience for people to go through. And so many people are increasingly being affected by wildfires,” explains Der.

Der’s grandmother grew up in Pioneer, a once booming goldmine town in the BRV. As a child, Gillian first began working with fiber while visiting her grandmother often knitting and learning other craft and fiber art practices from the women in her family. This style of art making is embedded in her time in BRV. Der was present during the 2023 wildfire and that intense personal experience sparked her interest in pursuing this topic for her research.

“I’m looking at how this remote community is processing what happened, how they responded to the event and how they are holding together as a community post-fire in a place that has not always received a lot of government attention and support,” says Der.

After the evacuation, Der returned to the community and ended up reconnecting with her friends in the local stitching group, a place where formative conversations were taking place about how residents were processing the grief of losing both their homes and the aftermath of the large-scale landscape change local environment. With hands busy, minds and hearts would open up to talking about this difficult collective experience.

“When we move our hands and talk through difficult experiences it can allow us to be more vulnerable and cohesive in our expressions. It also creates a physical documentation of the experience to reflect on,” explains Der.

While there are plenty of statistics associated with wildfires, hectares burned, people displaced, cost of damages in economic terms, the emotional toll these climate disasters take on individuals and communities is not as well understood or documented. Through her time in the stitching circle, Der discovered how collective art making is a way to help people move through difficult experiences and rebuild a sense of community. Blending traditional research methods using expert interviews and focus groups with collective art making, Der’s research has culminated in two art exhibitions, the first titled Hold Over Fires, which opened on April 21st in Vancouver at the Alternatives Gallery. Collaborating with Stephanie Koenig, posAbilities’ Artist in Residence, the show is comprised of photographs, drawings and felted tapestries that respond to the time Der and Koenig spent in the post-fire landscape at Downton Lake. Der will then take a version of the show back up to the community in July 2025 with the support of the Chapman & Innovation Grant from UBC’s Centre for Community Engaged Learning. There the collectively produced fibre work will be exhibited alongside Der’s own, the culmination of a shared grieving process for the personal and the land.

“The work is asking what does it mean to make and unmake homes on unceded territory? What is the importance of moving through these ruins and how does that shape our relationship to a post wildfire landscape and as well as to these places that are changing due to wildfire in increasing severity?” says Der.

Attitudes are slowly shifting around wildfire management to include crucial Indigenous perspectives and cultural practices.

“It’s important that we start moving towards a geography of wildfire that encompasses these more emotional aspects of what people are going through, while at the same time not losing the critical edge. The way we fight wildfire today is deeply related to colonial forest practice,” Der explains.

The rich tapestry Der weaves finds ways to thread all these ideas together into a cohesive exploration of race, identity, coloniality and cultural informed wildfire response. Utilizing creative nonfiction as another tool to explore these concepts, Der was recently shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards for her piece titled Third Child. This written work is a response to her experience finding her family memorial site in the burned forest. Another way of making sense of the grief and chaos of climate disaster and colonialism.

Der’s arts-based practice is an important response to an often technical and scientific understanding of identity and the climate emergency. Her work teaches us the emotional and experiential landscape is just as valuable as the physical one.

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