Moon gates symbolizing the full moon, birth and renewal are common in classical Chinese buildings and gardens. For the 2012 Burning Man festival—the theme of which was “Fertility 2.0”—I worked with nine other artists from the Liminal Labs theme camp to design and build this 12-foot-high steel moon gate.
Our architects, in various places around the globe, made exacting CAD drawings of the gate, and the measurements were transferred to raw metal. Fabricators, of which I was one, carefully cut, drilled, bent and welded square steel tubing and metal plate. These we overlaid with a “skin” of steel, perforated in patterns that create hypnotic moiré effects as they overlap. We transported the gate in sections to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where the festival is held. After we arrived at Black Rock City and reassembled the gate, we ran programmable LED lights around the circumference of the structure. We bring our Moon Gate to Burning Man every year now.