Grove co-founder Ken and woodshop manager Sean recently travelled to Las Vegas to build a large bamboo sculpture for the Electric Daisy Carnival aka EDC - a huge electronic music festival which attracts roughly 345,000 people. Sean and Ken worked with Bamboo DNA, a company led by Ken’s friend and mentor Gerard Minakawa.
Bamboo DNA “specializes in contemporary bamboo architectural and sculptural applications” building large scale structures for festivals such as Burning Man, Coachella, and EDC. To avoid the desert heat the seven person team worked from 6pm to 6am under intense artificial lights for seven nights straight.
“It was amazing to see massive piles of raw bamboo material transform over the week into a very airy, light looking sculpture” said Sean. The highlight was the final moment of the eighty-four hour week when the generators shut off, lights went out, and Tecate in hand they all sat back and looked at what they had just built.
The art structure was eighty feet tall and 170 feet in diameter, using both modern rigging techniques and traditional knots to hold thirty-one columns all in place. The purpose of this sculpture was to be a place of rest and rejuvenation for festival goers.
Sean and Ken want to thank Gerard and the Bamboo DNA badasses who they worked with all week: Nicholas, Roman, Ryan, Fez, Luke, Laura, Brandon and Andrew. The two lone Grovers brought their enthusiasm for bamboo back to Portland which has inspired our shop to look at our work in a new light.
goGrove!
Bamboo DNA “specializes in contemporary bamboo architectural and sculptural applications” building large scale structures for festivals such as Burning Man, Coachella, and EDC. To avoid the desert heat the seven person team worked from 6pm to 6am under intense artificial lights for seven nights straight.
“It was amazing to see massive piles of raw bamboo material transform over the week into a very airy, light looking sculpture” said Sean. The highlight was the final moment of the eighty-four hour week when the generators shut off, lights went out, and Tecate in hand they all sat back and looked at what they had just built.
The art structure was eighty feet tall and 170 feet in diameter, using both modern rigging techniques and traditional knots to hold thirty-one columns all in place. The purpose of this sculpture was to be a place of rest and rejuvenation for festival goers.
Sean and Ken want to thank Gerard and the Bamboo DNA badasses who they worked with all week: Nicholas, Roman, Ryan, Fez, Luke, Laura, Brandon and Andrew. The two lone Grovers brought their enthusiasm for bamboo back to Portland which has inspired our shop to look at our work in a new light.
goGrove!
