I hate writing these things! :) So I'm going to write it once and be done with it! :)
If you're here for a bio or artist statement for a publicatrion or party announcement or gallery showing, please let me know, then take your pic of length and content.
Contents:
(preferred statements -- try these first)
Bio
Artist statement
Artist statement (firefall specific)
Firefall blurb
Tiny Firefall blurb
(other statements)
Bio (firefall) (more of a short history)
Bio (firefall shorter)
Bio (firefall shortest)
Bio (firefall super-duper short!)
What is it?
Fire-related bio
Artist goals
Specific firefalls
The Ceramic Thing
The Cauldron
Egeria
Lilypad Pond
(Scott's projects)
Thought (desription)
Comet Arch (description)
Artist bio (Scott)
Artist statement (Scott)
Bio:
From a young age, I've always drawn or painted. In high school, I taught myself to paint in acrylics with brush and then airbrush. Later in life, I discovered sculpture and have forsaken 2D altogether. Professionally, I've worked in 3D computer animation, and on my own I've studied silver smithing, origami, hand-built clay sculpture, wood working, African drum making (taught myself), Native American Indian skills (hide tanning, arrow making, animal tracking), neon sculpture, and large scale installations. In 1998, I went to Burning Man for the first time, and was driven to build a large water fountain on fire. Since then, I've been building more and bigger sculptures.
Artist statement:
Most of my artwork deals with illumination (fire, neon, el-wire, fiber optics) and with building things (metal, glass, wood, found objects.) I'm most interested in how illuminated art moves outward, interacting directly with the environment around it. I deeply enjoy the technical and engineering challenges of sculpture -- the engineering of a piece is just as beautiful as the aesthetic design. I also love sculpture because it is the most hands-on and intimate form of creating art.
Artist statement (firefall specific):
Most of my artwork deals with illumination (fire, neon, el-wire, fiber optics) and with building things (metal, glass, wood, found objects, 3D computer modeling.) I find fire, in particular, to be an interesting creative element (not a destructive element) -- in particular, coupling fire with metal, since you must use fire and heat to create with metal. I use water in my art to give shape to fire and make the fire flow where I want. Fire draws the viewer into a meditation and I like tapping into that emotion.
Bio (firefall) (more of a short history):
The summer of 1998, I was on a camping trip with my friend Leslie Picardo. He brought all the camping gear, so I bought some fuel for his camping stove. We filled it up but it wouldn't light. We figured out that someone had returned the can of fuel filled with water! We dumped out the stove to protect it. And, having nothing to do and nothing to eat, Leslie lit the cup with the water and the last of the fuel. It burned for a time down to the level of the water then stopped. I thought to myself, "now that's kinda cool!" In January 1999, I started doing experiments in a bucket in my bathtub to see if I could maintain a flame on the water by continually injecting fuel at the top of a stream of water. By April, I had my first firefall I call The Ceramic Thing because it uses a nozzle that I found that I have no idea what it's for! After I finished it, I knew I needed something bigger for Burning Man! I wanted something about 2' in diameter -- a single tier to overflow into a larger basin. After months of searching, I found a stainless steel bowl that is now the top bowl to The Cauldron It was quite a bit bigger than I wanted! But it was so lovely I had to get it anyway. As I worked on it, I wanted it to stand where The One Tree had stood in 1998, where the road out to the Man comes into the main Center Camp, since mine was also fire and water -- little did I know The KeyHole position is the most coveted position at Burning Man! Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man has asked me to build a firefall for Burning Man 2002. That firefall is called Egeria and will stand over 8' tall, and is made of copper.
Bio (firefall shorter):
The summer of 1998, I was on a camping trip with my friend Leslie Picardo. He brought all the camping gear, so I bought some fuel for his camping stove. We filled it up but it wouldn't light. We figured out that someone had returned the can of fuel filled with water! We dumped out the stove into a cup to protect it. And, having nothing to do and nothing to eat, Leslie lit the cup with the water and the last of the fuel. It burned for a time down to the level of the water then stopped. I thought to myself, "now that's kinda cool!" In January 1999, I started doing experiments in a bucket in my bathtub. I built The Ceramic Thing by April. But I knew I needed something bigger for Burning Man! At the end of June, I found a stainless steel bowl which I used to create The Cauldron For 2002, Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, has asked me to build a firefall. That firefall is called Egeria and will stand over 8' tall, and is made of copper.
Bio (firefall shortest):
The summer of 1998, I was on a camping trip with my friend Leslie Picardo. He brought all the camping gear, so I bought some fuel for his stove but it wouldn't light. Someone had returned the fuel filled with water! We dumped out the stove into a cup, and, having nothing to do and nothing to eat, Leslie lit the cup. It burned for a time down to the level of the water then stopped. I thought to myself, "now that's kinda cool!" I did some experiments in a bucket in my tub, then built The Ceramic Thing by April and built The Cauldron for Burning Man 1999. I'm currently working on Egeria the founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, for Burning Man 2002.
Bio (firefall super-duper short!):
On a fateful camping trip, where a new-bought can of fuel was, in fact, filled with water instead, I discovered how to set water on fire. After some experiments, I found a way to maintain a flame on a falling stream of water, and the Firefall was born.
What is it?:
The Firefall is a water fountain on fire. The water protects you so you can hold the fire in your bare hands.
Bio (fire):
My mother always let me play with fire, ever since I was small, which was probably smart because I never played with fire alone. I was more interested in making things with fire -- melting them and putting them together. I didn't just try to make things burn. I made candles, melted plastic to build sculptures, and experimented with casting.
Artist goals:
I want to expand my sculptures to larger and larger scale. I really enjoy the mental challenge of the engineering of large artwork. The technical engineering of a piece is just as much of the beauty for me. I would also like to find a way to make my living building large sculptures, so I can devote my full life to building challenging works of art.
The Firefall is a water fountain on fire. The water protects you so you can hold the fire in your bare hands. The Ceramic Thing is named and built from a strange spout I found at a salvage yard. No one knows what it was made for, but its unique shape is perfect to hold a flame at the top so that blue flames flow over a single stream of water. People can reach into the flame and scoop out fire to play with!
The Firefall is a water fountain on fire. The water protects you so you can hold the fire in your bare hands. The Cauldron is a single-tier firefall, with a 4'8" stainless steel bowl, spilling over all the way around into a 6' bottom basin. The water in the top tier is mirror-smooth, so people can scoop up the flames. The water falls over the edge in a perfectly smooth sheet all the way around, with blue flames dancing up and down the falling water, so people can hold their hands in the falling water and allow the flames to play in their hands. The water pump moves over 15,600 gallons per hour, which is nearly 4 gallons a second. It holds about 400 gallons of water total. I built the Cauldron firefall for Burning Man 1999 and it has made many appearances around the Bay Area ever since. No one has ever been hurt or burned in over 40 hours of run-time and 100 gallons of fuel.
The Firefall is a water fountain on fire. The water protects you so you can hold the fire in your bare hands. Egeria is a 3-tier firefall currently being built for Burning Man 2002. It will stand over 8' tall and be 10'for the bottom-most tier. The lower catch basin will be a 25' bricked in courtyard area, with a sitting wall around where people can contemplate the fountain and the surrounding city. Egeria is named after the Roman goddess of fountains. Egeria was counsel and lover to King Numa who reigned Rome after Romulus. When he died, she ran into a grove and wept for so long that she became a fountain.
The Firefall is a water fountain on fire. The water protects you so you can hold the fire in your bare hands. The Lilypad Pond has been a dream of mine since I first built the Cauldron in 1999. This year, it will be on the playa as a collaboration with the Flaming Lotus Girls, who built magnificent flaming copper flowers, and who are planning a whole flower garden on fire, and with Scott Bartlett who built a pyrotube project called Thought, which is a tangle of tubes that has tiny blue flames that move throug hte tubes. The Lilypad Pond incoportaes a new kind of firefall, where only the small blue flames play and dance across the surface. The pyrotubes will mimic tiny fish darting under the surface of the water. The pond will have flaming water plants, including lilypads [of course!], irises, cattails, horse tails, and parrot's feather, among others.
Bio (professional):
(before you use this bio, please check with me. I would rather be identified with my own artwork, rather than who I've worked for.)
From adolescence, I learned to program computers. When I went to UNC-Chapel Hill, I would take a programming class and an art class every semester for fun. I rapidly bored of the undergrad CS classes and soon started taking graduate-level classes in the CS department. I also joined the Walkthru research team, building architectrual models for the head-mounted display. Computer graphics was a natural area of focus for me, and I went on to work at Virtus, who produced the modeling software we used for research, and then on to Pixar, where I started as a game programmer, then moved into programming for the Crowds team on "A Bug's Life", then modeling and lighting on the short "For The Birds" and "Toy Story 2". I then moved on to Pulse Entertainment, a web-based 3D animation company. I have since left to learn to weld and work on my own.
Description of Thought:
A tangle of clear tubes fill the inside of a globe. After a moment, a blue flame, starts to flow throughout, swirling, turning, splitting, and finally dying away.
Description of The Comet Arch (Scott & Kiki collaboration):
Clear tubes arch overhead to a flame centerpiece. Every once in a while, blue comets with orange tails streak down on either side. Make a wish and pass through!
Artist bio (Scott):
Scott is a metal sculptor, working primarily in welded steel. His current projects incorporate flames moving through clear tubing. His latest project, called Thought, is an intricate spherical tangle of tubing, where blue thought-like flames weave, twist, split and eventually die away. It has been shown at a variety of events in the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Black Rock. Scott has designed interactive computer music installations using both infrared and ultrasonic sonar as input stimuli to markov processes and other computational engines to produce dynamic sonic tapestries. He is also an accomplished B&W photographer, focusing on religious sculpture and architecture and also the complexity of massive industrial facilities. Scott graduated with a BS in computer engineering from NC State University and currently designs microprocessors at Transmeta. He still plays with LEGOS.
Artist statement (Scott):
I enjoy melding old and new technology together in interesting ways to create art that is visual, audible, or both. My most successful art places objects in completely different contexts - seeing the unseen or hearing the unheard. I am just beginning to gain my stride in using fire and metal as mediums, so look out!