About — Secretly Abandoned Spaces

About

Secretly Abandoned Spaces is a large-scale art installation and an Honorarium Art Grant Selection for Burning Man 2022. Created by artist and sculptor Valerie Mallory and illustrator and concept designer Mikell Haynes, the piece is currently being assembled by a crew based in Santa Clara, CA and nearby.

Check out our Facebook Page for additional project information and images.

Concept art for Secretly Abandoned Spaces

Philosophy

Every abandoned space retains a feeling of what it once was: a library, a railway station, a beautiful house. When stripped to its remains, we see a different kind of beauty — a beauty of that which is forsaken and left adrift. Time takes back its own. Elegance that emerges from loss tells the story of predicted and necessary change.

This piece is about the beauty of loss and decay. One enters an old house where mortals used to live and created stories of their lives. These souls still live in the walls of this haunted space. The house becomes a church of collected ideas from a past era.

Secretly Abandoned Spaces is an ephemeral museum, a piece that tells the story of forgotten moments lost with the passage of time: a lonely place, surrounded by red trees and haunted with cast figures.

Concept art of a woman reaching skyward, entwined in a bare, twisting tree on the desert playa

Concept art of a hooded woman in long draped robes standing before a fallen, gnarled tree on cracked desert ground

Concept art of a woman with long dark hair emerging from a weathered driftwood trunk

Concept art of a pale figure seen from behind, leaning against a bleached dead tree on a desert salt flat

Figures of a Forgotten Place

The cast figures that inhabit Secretly Abandoned Spaces are as ornate as structures of antiquity. The expressions on their masked faces echo the elemental ways we integrate with the world as we pass through it.

The interplay of figures tell their own stories. Some remain inside, sitting or standing in places they still hold on to. Others wander through the desolate area around their old home or hide in the branches of the surrounding trees.

Cast face with closed eyes wrapped in cloth, cradled by two cast hands in a wooden box

Cast sculpture of a hooded woman embracing a younger figure, both draped in pale green cloth

Close-up of a cast face with closed eyes and a deeply lined brow

Cast sculpture of a smiling woman with long pale hair, held from behind by a hooded figure

Design

Secretly Abandoned Spaces is a visual story about the places that were once full of activity, but are now abandoned and forgotten. The design evokes an archaic, abandoned church in late autumn: a lonely place, surrounded by red trees and haunted with cast figures.

The Central Structure

The central structure is an ornate space worn down by time, like an old church in a state of decay. Its windows gape open in disrepair, laced with curtains blowing in the wind. A curved staircase spirals upward to a closed area above.

Cupola

Staircase

Concept art for staircase — Staircase concept art

Surrounding Area

The central structure is surrounded by blood red trees, gnarled and leafless, some with ghost-like figures intertwined in their branches. The area is haunted with cast figures throughout, lingering phantoms of those who once inhabited the space.

Concept art of a woman standing in a tree

Concept art of a woman intertwined in a red tree

Concept art of a couple embracing in a red tree

Concept art of a woman arching back with her face turned upward beside a red tree

Concept art of a woman lying on the ground beside a red tree

Thanks for your support

Secretly Abandoned Spaces was designed and created by Valerie Mallory Art for Burning Man 2022, with support from a Burning Man Honorarium Art Grant. We're deeply grateful to the dedicated crew of builders, volunteers, and financial donors who helped make this happen. Thank you so much!

We've brought large-scale art installations to Burning Man every year since 2014. Please swing by our studio site to learn more about our work and see what we're up to now.

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