I’m an artist and designer living in Miami, Florida. With the help of a dumpster, some charcoal, and a lot of hard work, I transformed a literal dumpster fire into a work of art.

I made this piece in the parking lot behind my apartment building after a lit cigarette was thrown onto a pile of mulch, turning it into an enormous pile of smoldering garbage.

I quickly grabbed as many cans, boxes, and bags as I could find and started searching for materials to turn the garbage pile into something beautiful.

The resulting pile was so massive that you could see it from all over the city. “What could it be?” people thought. “Is it art? Is it trash?” Feathers were ruffled, but no one knew what to think.*

The transformation of something ugly into something beautiful is the central theme in art. By creating an object of beauty out of nothing, the artist teaches us to see the world differently.

The process of making art involves getting past the barriers that keep us from seeing things as they really are. In this case, it was layers of grime, rust, and filth that kept me from seeing the beauty lurking within a literal dumpster fire.

The first step was getting past my initial reaction to the burning trash and considering it as a starting point for a sculpture instead of an eyesore. I liked the idea of using it as a base for an abstract work, but it needed some inspiration to get going. I thought of how movements like Futurism and Dada used found objects or random materials as building blocks for their works. I also remembered how much my dad loved abstract modern sculptures by artists such as Richard Serra and Donald Judd. Those two inspirations combined in my mind to form something unique: a sculpture made from a literal dumpster fire!

I started out with a pile of charcoal and some wire hangers. I twisted the hangers into loops, filled them with charcoal, then twisted them closed again. I hung the pieces from trees and telephone poles around my neighborhood and set them on fire.

A week later, my house was robbed and burned to the ground. The next day I started shooting photographs of the disaster zone. A week after that, I had an art show in a gallery in Little Italy.

I live in Baltimore now. My life is more complicated than it used to be; there are more things to steal and more people to steal them from me. But once a year I return home to shoot more photos of things on fire.

The idea of burning trash on my roof seemed kind of gross at first, but I figured if it could be done safely, and if the end result could look good, then maybe it was worth a try. The goal was to make an eye-catching piece of art that would express my personal style in a way that would be interesting for my family and friends to look at. The charcoal art turned out to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing. It has become the talk of family barbecues, and it has won several awards in community art shows.

The process of making charcoal art is not complicated. It doesn’t require any special tools or materials–just a little bit of creativity with whatever you have on hand. The only hard part is finding the time to do it while the fire is burning. But once you have a completed charcoal piece, you will have something that is uniquely yours, that shows your personality, and can be enjoyed by those who know you and those who don’t.

I bought a pile of charcoal left behind by a neighbor who was grilling food. He dropped his charcoal in my driveway, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t grill, and so I had several bags of charcoal in my garage when the Oakland firestorm started.

The day the fires hit, I was out at work, and my husband called to tell me we needed to evacuate immediately. I left work and went home to start gathering photographs, heirlooms and other things we might need if our house burned down.

Tears were streaming down my face as I tried to decide what to take and what to leave. I realized that if we lost everything, it would be like losing a part of us. Everything we owned had been carefully chosen over many years or inherited from family — the keepsakes, books, photographs all held special meaning for us.

What to save? What to lose? My husband came home from work and began loading up the car with whatever he could find; he told me he wasn’t taking time to look around because too much was at stake. I couldn’t do it that way — there was no way I could just leave without taking one last look around our home. As I stood there surveying the damage

I had to make a charcoal drawing. Not a charcoal drawing like you and I might make, but a charcoal drawing that could be sold for lots of money at an art exhibition.

Thing is, I don’t know anything about charcoal drawings. So I decided to copy the one that I did know about: Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

That’s my story.

*A splattered wall.* I could hear my mother’s voice in my head as I stared at the mess that was once a wall in my studio. It had been splattered with paint, charcoal, and some kind of goo that had hardened over the past year. And the smell of smoke still lingered.

Tearing down your art is never an easy thing to do, but sometimes it’s necessary. And when I needed a change, this time felt right for burning it all down. My last show was closing soon, so it didn’t feel like a big risk to burn everything from it (except for one piece).

Let me be clear: this doesn’t mean that I don’t love my old work anymore or that I don’t think it was good. Looking at it now, though, I can see how my new work has evolved from where I started. But it wasn’t until I burned it all down that I would realize what other things had also been burned away.