An Electrified Weeping Willow

Charlie Gadeken is a self-taught sculptor and crafty artist who uses fire as his source material. More precisely, he uses this medium to make photos, short-lived sculptures, and sophisticated installations. As he says, fire is a “highly kinetic element” and is an obvious choice for symbolic artworks. Recently, he found a new way to convey his strong passion for the primitive forces of nature and the idea of communion.

Aurora is a half-organic, half-electric sculpture inspired by the Tree of Souls, the massive tree that carries the plot of James Cameron’s humanist fable Avatar, and which triggers a war between those blue aliens and imperialist humans.

Gadeken set up a lightning system on the most romantic and art-friendly of trees, a weeping willow—and a large one indeed: 30 feet tall by 45 feet wide. As he has explained his project in Wired: “During the daytime, 5,000 copper leaves will flicker from light to dark, shimmering as the breeze travels across the surface of the tree. At night, the 30,000 LEDs that line the tree will light up, change color and make the tree shimmer in a completely different way.” How nice is that? That could be the setup of the next Animal Collective music video, or a visual poem that revolves around the uncanny and moving friendship between a shy kid and a bird.

This electric totem will be unveiled and displayed this summer at the famous hippie art festival Burning Man, which gathers a large community of spiritual enthusiasts in the Nevada desert for a intense week dedicated to “community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.” Past themes have included Fertility, Time, Hell, Outer Space, The Body, The Floating World, Beyond Belief, Vault of Heaven, Psyche, Hope and Fear, The Green Man, The American Dream, Evolution, and Metropolis. This year’s theme is “Rites of Passage.” We don’t exactly know what means, but we hope this project will contribute to the sense of community.

[Via Wired]