I spent four weeks building a covered wagon for Burning Man; I had never been.
My friend Calli Beck of Stark Raven Fabrication asked me to help with a project called Dusty Heart Tumbleweed Soul; she needed a covered wagon as a sort of sibling piece to her main sculpture. I said yes for many reasons. I wanted to use my skills to help a friend. I wanted to work with my hands again. Most importantly, and somewhat serendipitously, the timing was absurdly convenient: I was leaving a job, ending a relationship, starting new work, and moving into a new apartment. If I was going to spend a month building something for the desert, this was the month to do it.
The Concept
Calli approached me with a simple text, “I want you to build the wagon.” She sent over a concept sketch (below), and we had our first meeting.
In that first meeting, I asked a very simple question. “How much of this do you want me to take on?” The answer gave me permission to make it my own: “All of it.” This was not atypical of my way of working, but it is rare. Over the past several years, I’ve executed other people’s (typically strict) designs. But this project was different. I had a concept to go from, an idea of the whole piece (tumbleweed, firepit, and wagon), but other than that I was given free rein to design and fabricate what I’d like.
I started with research.
One of my favorite ways of working is taking real-world ideas and expanding them into stories, folklore, and myth to create something just slightly outside our world. This was what we were going to do with the wagon.
The tumbleweed is the centerpiece; the wagon is its companion. My goal was to design and build a covered wagon that would not pull attention from Calli’s tumbleweed sculpture.
We wanted to build a place to rest. Deep playa art is mostly something you approach, look at, and leave. We wanted to create a place where you could sit down, rest, hang out, and make connections. We also wanted the wagon to be a storytelling object; that decision drove a few of its “tricks”.
The Design
The wagon reads at somewhere between a third and a half of full scale. A full-size covered wagon would have competed with the tumbleweed, and the wagon’s job was never to pull focus. It needed to be small enough to be a companion, large enough to interact with and to sit on.
Inside, there is a bench and a mechanical chandelier of sorts. Outside, two doors open to books and storytelling objects. The canvas cover turned out to be the most important surface on the whole piece, because I designed it as a screen.
It had to survive transport, dust, heat, and wind, and it had to be light enough to move.
Once the design was complete and word got out that we were building an old wagon, a donation came through. One of our team had an old wagon on his property, and he offered to donate the whole thing. Not knowing what we could use for it, we drove an hour and picked it up.
I spent most of an afternoon reclaiming as many parts from this wagon as possible, which wasn’t much. We ended up using the wheels, some brackets, and the tongue loop on our wagon. It was nice to add some authenticity to the design. The wheels also rolled, which made moving it much, much easier.
Special Effects: The Shadow Effect
This is the part I am proudest of, and it is embarrassingly simple. It’s also the only thing that didn’t survive the playa.
A single point light sits inside the wagon. In front of it sits a circular transparency, printed on an inkjet printer. The light throws the image through the transparency and onto the inside of the canvas cover, so the whole wagon top becomes a lit shadow scene visible from outside.
Early in the build meetings, we knew we wanted the wagon to tell stories, and we wanted others involved in that process. Mouse volunteered to lead a team of illustrators, and they produced a set of images based on fairy tales. I had almost nothing to do with the artwork. I designed and built the effect that carried it.
It is an LED system, which felt a little out of place next to a real fire pit and a burning tumbleweed. I noticed it every night. I also couldn’t argue with the result, which turned out better than anyone expected, including me.
The Finished Piece on the Playa
The first time I saw the wagon sitting in open playa, it looked like it belonged there. That is not a small thing. I designed it, drafted it, built it, and installed it, and it did not read as an object somebody had dropped in the desert. It read as part of the place.
Not everything survived contact. We had never lit the wagon before we got there, which was a mistake. The shadow effect on the canvas was exactly right. The bookcase lights were far too bright.
I knew the wagon would work as something to look at. That is my job, and I have been doing it a long time. Watching strangers interact with something I built does not move me much anymore, because in the theater I’ve watched that happen every night for a decade. What I did not anticipate was how people would use it as a place. They sat in it. They told each other stories in it. It became somewhere to be rather than something to see.
One night I was on duty at the piece with Sky Rat as a dust storm built. We got the fire lit and the tumbleweed’s flame effect going, and it became obvious the storm was only growing. We took shelter on the wagon seat and talked for hours about relationships, our past selves, and what any of us were doing out there, while visibility dropped and the wind got louder. The wagon was our safe place.
On the last night, somebody pulled an art car up next to the piece and started playing vinyl. Phish, then Pink Floyd. It drew the largest, most generous crowd we had all week.
Learned Lessons
Light it before you leave the shop. Everything else about the piece was tested. The lighting was not, and it was the only element we needed to correct on site.
Transparent film does not belong in the desert. The shadow images were printed on transparency and they did not hold up to wind, or to a burner walking into them in the dark. The only reason it was not a real problem is that we brought spares. Next version gets a rigid, replaceable carrier that can take a hit.
Interactive work builds a relationship faster than work you look at. Art that people handle gets pedestrian fast, and pedestrian is the point. Instead of understanding the piece, they start living near it. It becomes part of their environment. That is the kind of work I want to make. I would rather build an experience than an object people admire from a polite distance.
Bigger and more dangerous reads better. More fire. More interaction. Stronger effects. Scale does real work on the playa, and fire creates connection faster than anything else I watched all week.