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 project updates and news.
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.
Design for staircaseConcept art for staircase
Design for staircaseConcept art for staircase
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.
Design for staircaseConcept art for staircase
Concept art of a woman intertwined in a red treeConcept art of a couple embracing in a red treeConcept art of a woman leaning forward
Concept art of a woman lying on the ground beside a red tree
Get Involved
Thanks to a Burning Man Honorarium Art Grant and help from a dedicated crew of volunteers, Secretly Abandoned Spaces is currently being built! But there are still many financial costs that need to be covered, including the material costs for casting the figures as well as transportion and fuel expenses.
Please help us bring this work to the playa by donating to our fundraising campaign.