Meredith SK

I was a volunteer for the Steampunk Treehouse, a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant recipient in 2007. I was a welder on the branches at American Steel in Oakland, and put together the tire swing once on playa. What's a treehouse without a swing? It's a good thing that 20k test rigging cable, hardware, and 5' tractor tires are not hard things to get in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Timpany Lambada was a large-scale, grant-winning fire sculpture by the Flaming Lotus Girls. My good friend Margaret Long, the art lead of the project, contacted me to created reactive sculpture at the ground level of the project- AKA, benches. The benches incorporated sound-reactive lighting. Full color LED's  inside diffusion spheres would pulse according to the dominant sound frequencies, dynamically changing between blasting dance music and quiet conversation. I designed the benches to match the main structure; creating CNC paths in Illustrator and cutting them out of 1/4 plate steel. I then welded the pieces together using steel tubing, and added wooden benches.

Grant-winning sculpture for Coachella  2012. I designed the patterned steel plates making up the sculpture, CNC plasma cut and welded into great columns. The design was an algorithmically generated pattern based on classic Islamic geometry, manipulated to a more organic, flowing pattern. The design captured rotational symmetry while becoming something new and organic- complimenting the severe, angular towers that gracefully wove through the air. (more…)