Rekindled passion: fire and fallout

Most people collect something or other. A pile of copies of this journal qualifies as a collection. Other collections are more idiosyncratic. As a child and adolescent the Finnish artist Jussi Kivi was fascinated by the work of firefighters at a fire station near his family’s Helsinki home. He kept his toy fire engines, model fire stations, and firefighting comics, books, and games, and as an adult he supplemented them with new acquisitions. Eventually his hobby yielded enough material to stock a private museum at his studio through the 1990s until 2004, when he decided that enough was enough and put everything into long term storage.

But the artist’s interest in firefighters as rescuers was rekindled last year when he discovered …