Burning Man is less than a month away, and artists at The Generator, a community art space in Sparks, are hard at work on their pieces for the Playa.
Andy Tibbetts, an artist and fabricator, has been working on a steel sculpture called "Bee Dance" since February.
"It's a commissioned piece from an artist in London," Tibbetts said. "It's the third piece I've done for her at Burning Man so this is all fabrication. It's 18 feet tall and it's a giant jungle gym for adults to climb on and confident kids too."
The dancing bees represent the importance of honeybees worldwide, and the piece is meant to call attention to the declining population of bees worldwide.
"Bees dance in order to communicate where flowers are, where to get pollen and they have a whole entire language of dancing to communicate to the rest of the hive," Tibbetts said. "So that's traditionally where you hear the phrase bee dance."
Tibbetts, who worked as a structural engineer, is forming the bees out of steel.
"People can climb on it - the saying goes read the back of your ticket," Tibbetts said. "There's a lot of artwork at Burning Man that's too fragile to be climbed on, but there's a lot of art that is deliberately made for people to climb on, and this is one of those pieces. Sometimes, from a really great distance, you can see people interacting with your art, especially a climbable structure such as this where you see someone silhouetted on it. There are acrobats, circus people that will be doing handstands on the head of the bees."
There are several Burning Man pieces in the works at The Generator.
"The Generator is incredible," Tibbetts said." It's one of the most unique build spaces in the world. The scale of what's possible and the pool of knowledge within the building, so many people who are so skilled in so many aspects. The art poses so many technical challenges that need to be solved daily. Every night I'm thinking about what I'm going to do the next day, how am I going to machine this part, how am I going to build a fixture to hold that in place, to weld it; those problems are so fascinating, they are so much fun to work on, and the opportunity to do that presents itself umpteen times a day doing artwork like this."
The sculpture will go to the powder coaters in the coming weeks and then two flatbeds will transport it to the Playa.
"It's the world's greatest canvas," Tibbetts said. "You have the Playa, beautiful backdrop and you can plop anything on it, any scale and it's really fascinating to see things that are massive within the city, the shop, these huge structures that just become miniscule when you set them down on the Playa. So many of us are out there a week ahead of time, cranes and forklifts and all kinds of work, building things that are going to be out there for a week. It's kind of magical."
