Earthdance Installation - Concepts and Planning

One of the great things about designing your own festival is that you can build almost anything you want, according to the limitations of your venue.

For Earthdance, I've been working on a very large sculpture that will hang in the center of Arcosanti's Vaults. I had always wanted to do something interesting with the space—it's just begging to have the space it creates be redefined by something existing in the center. With Earthdance, I figured this would be my chance. And it would be able to tie in with the whole "identity" of the festival. Titled "Red Lotus: Heart of the Earth, Heart of the Sun" (kind of lengthy, but the second part of the title is the "theme" of the festival), the idea is that it's sort of a physical and conceptual centerpiece.

Part sculpture, part Chihuly-esque chandelier, I wanted it to be large. Very large. I had a couple ideas of what I wanted it to be like—first, recycled papers used to create a membrane that was then colored, probably using shellac, to create a translucent form that could glow orange in the night, over the heads of all the people during the DJ sets.

Here are the sketches from my sketchbook. Kind of crappy, but gives the idea. I eventually settled on a three-sided pyramid-like shape, curving inwards to give an organic sort of feeling.







I eventually laid out the sides of the sculpture using yarn in the center of the Vaults so I could get a sense of scale. I basically settled on each side being 15' long on each side. The whole thing will be 5-8 ft "deep".





Kind of hard to see, but the yarn is there.





Jimmi standing next to the yarn outline for a sense of human scale (look hard).





Use your imagination!



The structure itself will be made out of metal rods welded together. A fine muslin will be wrapped around the frame to create the skin, with recycled papers and Arcosanti posters (most of which I designed in this case, oddly enough), paper mached on there and then shellacked to give color and smooth-ish texture. The whole thing will be lit from the inside, so it will glow orange in the night.

I'm just working on a small test piece to test out the paper/muslin/shellac combination. Then Brian and I will be welding the frame together over the weekend. So more updates are forthcoming. Watch closely!