Anthropic Glow Series: Starts With One
$2,240.00
Artist: Emma Lee Fleury
Medium: Acrylic
Artist Statement:
For me, Anthropic Glow Series: Starts With One speaks to the fragile relationship between mind, body, and land. The painting depicts a single tree engulfed in flame, standing within a larger forest fire. While the image is rooted in the increasing reality of wildfires across Canada, it is also intended as a metaphor. One spark becomes an inferno. One action creates consequences that extend far beyond its point of origin. The same can be said for our thoughts, behaviours, systems, and collective relationship with the natural world. As part of my ongoing Anthropic Glow Series, this work explores the visible and invisible ways human activity alters the environments we inhabit. I am interested in the tension between beauty and destruction; how something visually captivating can simultaneously represent loss, instability, and ecological change. When I think about place, I don’t see it as separate from us. The land shapes our memories, identities, emotions, and sense of belonging. Likewise, our choices leave marks on the landscapes around us. In that way, place exists not only outside the body, but within it. The burning tree in this painting becomes a symbol of both vulnerability and resilience. It stands isolated yet connected to a much larger system. Much like ourselves, it exists within a network of relationships, that are impossible to fully separate. Through this work, I hope viewers reflect on their own connection to the environments they inhabit and consider how attention, action, and responsibility ripple outward. Every large-scale transformation begins somewhere. Sometimes it starts with one.
Artist Biography:
Emma Lee Fleury is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in Muskoka, Ontario. Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, music, earth art, and environmental installation, her practice is rooted in environmental awareness, human nature, and the emotional energy carried within living things. Originally from Niagara, Emma studied sculpture, painting and fine art at Brock University, as well as sculpture and painting at the University of the Fraser Valley in
British Columbia. Through these studies, she explored the relationship between the natural world, human behaviour, and the strange experience of existing within it. Her work has been exhibited throughout Southern, Central, and Northern Ontario, Southern British Columbia and can be found in private collections across Canada, as well as at the Muskoka Arts & Crafts Maker Shop, Muskoka Markets and the Annex for the month of July.
Emma’s ongoing Anthropocene-inspired work explores climate change, wildfire, ecological disruption, memory, identity, and the relationship between humans and the Earth – not as something separate from us, but as something we are deeply connected to. Through landscapes, imagined earthlings, creatures, abstract forms, and environmental installations, she creates work that moves between beauty, discomfort, humour, curiosity, and reflection. Her Anthropic Glow Series examines the visible and invisible ways human impact alters the landscapes around us. In May 2026, her work Anthropic Glow Series: 1 received the Muskoka Conservancy Art Award at the 49th Muskoka Arts & Crafts Spring Members Show.
For Emma, art is an opportunity to create moments of connection – with ourselves, with one another, and with the natural world. Whether working with paint, clay, or found organic materials, her practice remains rooted in curiosity, environmental awareness, and a deep appreciation for the living systems that connect us all.
