ARTWORK > Playing With Fire

Shapes derived from 6 stills from a video of a match being struck.

Archaeologists estimate that human beings started using fire, which they probably harvested from spontaneous grass fires or lightning strikes, a million years ago or so. Fire usually starts with some kind of explosion, as the heat that's applied reaches a high enough temperature for the fuel to ignite, so I begin the series with the lighting of a match — a small controlled explosion. I was surprised to learn that the first friction match was invented quite recently in the long history of humans using fire: 1826.