Gratitude Grove is a 20-foot-by-20-foot interactive geometric tree I designed and built for the festival circuit — it's shown at Lucidity, Burning Man, Desert Hearts, and Listen. It's the piece where I learned that building art at scale is 10% inspiration and 90% logistics, and that I love both halves.
The build
The vision was a tree rendered in sacred geometry — large enough to gather under, structured enough to hold up in a desert, and interactive enough that people wanted to touch it and stay. Getting there meant materials procurement, structural design, a build team, and a piece that could be assembled, disassembled, transported, and reassembled across multiple events without falling apart or losing its soul.
The operation
I led all of it: logistics, sourcing, the build crews, and the multi-event assembly and transport operation. A festival installation isn't a sculpture you place once — it's a traveling system. Every joint has to survive being taken apart and put back together by tired people in the dark, in the wind, on a deadline that doesn't move.
Why it belongs here
People are sometimes surprised my portfolio has a giant glowing tree in it, next to platforms and pipelines. To me it's the same muscle. Gratitude Grove is a physical proof of the thing I do in software: take a vision only one person can fully see and make it real, durable, and legible to everyone else — under real constraints, at real scale. The medium changes. The work is identical.
By the numbers
- 20' × 20' interactive installation
- 4 festivals: Lucidity, Burning Man, Desert Hearts, Listen
- Design, build & multi-event logistics lead
