Fire & Fantasy
Written By: Tyler Rigg | Photos By: Ben Leeson & Colin Trubee
It’s another summer night in Central Ohio. A towering mural of a young woman, her face glowing like a sunset against a background of twilight blue, begins to burn. A crowd watches as the poetic inferno grows. The mural itself is painted on the side of a house in Whitehall, and like strips of canvas torn from a giant painting, the work of art slowly deteriorates in full view. As the flames reach higher, the house next door—showing off a similar mural to her twin—begins to melt from the heat. August storm clouds rage above, casting lighting bolts across the sky, adding to the chaos happening below. After the storm, the heavens opened to reveal a rainbow across the smoke-filled skyscape.
The mural’s artist, Mandi Caskey—aka Miss Birdy—already knew what was in store for her work that summer night. Firefighters walked through the burning house, completing a training exercise. At the end of the night, the mural, titled Seeds Sown in Fire, became something greater, a cultural piece of performance and visual art. The mural was created in light of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade earlier that summer.
“I wanted to create a piece that was a conversation about [how] the things that you do today will affect the future of others,” Caskey says. “The idea is: The seeds you sow today will bloom tomorrow.”
Both of Caskey’s pieces, which were painted on two houses formerly occupied by owners of different generations, served in tandem to “symbolize the generations affecting each other.” Indeed, the flames that consumed one house also damaged its neighbor.
The artwork was done in collaboration with Caskey’s non-profit organization, Catalyst Columbus, and the City of Whitehall. Caskey founded Catalyst Columbus with community builder Brian Suiter to develop relationships between business owners and artists, ultimately using art to positively impact local communities.
Caskey’s artistic life was sparked many years ago. As a child, she already knew what she wanted to do, and as the granddaughter of an artist, creativity was in her genes. So, in 2011, she enrolled at Columbus College of Art & Design.
“I met a guy that took me on a graffiti date,” Caskey says, “[he] put a spray paint can in my hand, and it was all history from there. I started painting buildings; doing a lot of underground work, a lot of graffiti…People started traveling to see the work, and all of a sudden, business owners started noticing and then they started hiring me. It was kind of bizarre.”
So Caskey dropped out of school and started her own business creating murals. She spends hours a day in front of a wall crafting a piece—hours that turn into days, even weeks. At the end of it—a spectacle.
Caskey says that part of her artistic pursuit is “creating something that will exist with the environment, not work against it.”
“That’s definitely one of my favorite parts of mural - making,” she notes, “because I can make something that looks like it’s always been there and exists in that space naturally.”
Last year, Caskey created a mural in Springville, New York for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. She spent a month there working on the piece of public art.
“I got to become a part of the city and really engage with the community,” Caskey says, mentioning that the sense of belonging impacted the art itself. “It was very loving and very nurturing, and something that I felt a part of,” she adds. “I feel like Springville could be another home to me. I try to create murals in space where people feel safe and I can feel safe too. So, a lot of my murals are places I find that I can come back to…”
The mural, titled A Wish on the Wind, spans the length of a building in Springville, about 70 feet long and 20 feet tall. There sleeps a lady giant, her hair flowing and alight with stars, giving way to a city rising over her shoulder and rolling pastures over her hip.
Caskey is a fan of “anything fantasy,” drawing a lot of inspiration for her art from her favorite books, games, and movies.
“It really helps transcend the emotional world in a way that anybody can understand,” Caskey says.
“The hero’s journey, the call to action—all these things. It’s such a simple concept, but when it’s in fantasy, it can really help people relate to their everyday lives. I think that’s why I like painting in that style so much.”
In college, Caskey says she was focused on a hyperrealistic art style. But after learning spray painting, her style adapted and became something of its own.
“My spray paint methods and mural methods started to turn more illustrative and more of that glowy surreal,” she says, “because that’s what I was doing really well at. I feel like in the last two years, my work has really matured, in that my hand and my skills are finally coming together, where I imagine something that’s realistic [and] I can actually spray paint it now. It took me a while to get there.”
Apart from Caskey’s artistic work, she enjoys the other parts of the process as well. The art of mural-making involves operating boom lifts and spending hours upon hours high up in the air.
“Every time I get a boom lift, at the beginning of every mural and at the end of mural, I usually extend the boom as high as I can and sit,” Caskey says. “I’ll overlook the city that I’m painting in and sit down and put my feet over the side, wiggle them a little bit, having my own little moment in that space. It’s not often that people get to do that, so I like to take full advantage of it when I can.”
Though her career has been expansive and her murals can be seen across the country, Caskey is far from done.
“Expect a lot of weird pieces—big, weird pieces,” Caskey says with a laugh, adding that her tallest work is 9 stories tall and that it’s a personal goal of hers to create a mural around 20 stories tall.
“In terms of where—fuck, anywhere,” Caskey says. “Anywhere in the country that would want me to do that, I would absolutely be honored and love to attempt it.”
It’s clear to anyone who sees Miss Birdy’s art that wherever her work goes, there will be a window into a fantastical universe, pouring vivid and etheric color into a world that is always thirsting for it.
Published May, 2025