The Children of Smokeless Fire is a work of mystery and magic with two distinct inspirations: the famous ‘Cottingley Fairies’, created by two Bradford girls in 1917, and the Djinns, mythical beings depicted in a 13th-century Islamic manuscript by Zakariya al-Qazwini. The Cottingley Fairies were the creation of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who copied fairies from a children’s book, cut out their drawings and photographed them in Elsie’s garden. Intended as a playful prank, their images became a sensation after an article by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed them as evidence of a hidden spiritual realm. The fairies have a precursor of sorts in the Djinns, supernatural beings said to be formed from smokeless fire. The Djinns were depicted alongside animals and plants by Zakariya Al-Qazwini some 750 years ago in The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence, and show how medieval scholars combined empirical observations with spiritual dimensions. The Children of Smokeless Fire draws inspiration from this interplay between belief and scepticism – placing Djinn cutouts in natural environments to spark the same sense of wonder as did the Cottingley Fairies 100 years ago.