Gilded
Scared of snakes? Perhaps no more once you meet this sculpture. Once you are drawn to this western diamond back rattler you'll see that its’ scales are actually metallic flowers and leaves, it’s no longer a snake but a flower sculpture. You can decide if this is deceitful serpent from the garden of Eden or a tribute to creatures in nature?
For Burning Man 2022 we created Gilded. A project continuing our goal to engage participants to explore art from an unexpected perspective. From a distance our snake's scales are golden, silver, bronze and copper. Though when a participant moves closer, those scales reveal they are actually flowers and leaves. Lured in or intrigued, participants will want to spend more time and admire the sculpture’s beauty and feel its body.
This project is a continuation of Burning Man’s cooperative venture with artists from the City of Valencia, Spain. Our co-artist David Moreno Teron is a renowned Valencian artist sought for his sculptures which are part of that city’s annual Las Fallas festival. David’s contribution to the Gilded project is the design of the molds that were the basis of the flowers and leaves on the snake.
The flowers on Gilded were cast from 30 molds sent from Spain to our California workshop. It would take over a year to cast 3,000 concrete flowers. Those flowers were ‘gilded’ by our volunteer team who put in hundreds of hours coating and re-coating each flower in metallic paint so that they would hold up to the elements and glisten for years to come.
Gilded’s debut at Burning Man came in a year of intense heat and dust, yet this snake prevailed in its desert environment. Directly after the event we were invited to bring Gilded to Burning Man’s permanent hub for cultural education and community engagement called 360. Adjacent in the Black Rock desert near the town of Gerlach, Gilded will overlook the Nevada landscape throughout the coming seasons.
