Bliss Dance by Marko Cochrane. “I’ve worked on “Bliss Dance” every day since last year’s Burning Man. It’s composed of 55,000 welds, mostly done by hand. It’s 40 feet tall, weighs 7,000 pounds and is 97% air. The design is based around the structures of geodesic domes, and 4,500 of the ball joints are threaded to attach the steel mesh “skin” with screws. I used to do a lot of scale enlarging professionally, the original sculpture this was based on was 13 inches. I then made a 4 foot version and then this final 40 foot sculpture. It is supported by six I-beams buried 2 feet under the surface in a radial pattern.” (TS)
John Curley (that's me) has been Burning since the relatively late date of 2004, and in 2008 I spent the better part of a month on the playa, documenting the building and burning of Black Rock City in words and pictures. I loved it, and I've been doing it ever since.
I was a newspaper person in a previous life, and I spent many years at the San Francisco Chronicle. At the time I left, in 2007, I was the deputy managing editor in charge of Page One and the news sections of the paper. Since then, I've turned a passion for photography into a second career. I shoot for editorial, commercial and private clients. I've also taught a little bit, including two years at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and a year at San Francisco State University.
I live on the San Mateo coast, just south of San Francisco in California.
