Over the next few weeks, stacks of timber currently sitting in a garage in Buckland will become a larger-than-life fire-breathing gnome — and community members have the opportunity to help build it.
Northampton artist Ezra Livingston is creating “Fire Gnome,” an installation for the Burning Man festival, which will take place this year from Sunday, Aug. 30, to Monday, Sept. 7, in Black Rock City, Nevada. Livingston’s installation is one of 75 that were chosen to be part of the festival this year, and Burning Man gave him a $16,000 honorarium to create it.
The obvious question, of course, is: Why a fire-breathing gnome?
“I thought it was funny,” Livingston said.
When he originally had the idea, it was “definitely a bit of a joke,” he said. “I thought it would be funny to submit it, and then when they accepted it, I was like, ‘Oh, well, no, I guess this is not a joke anymore.’”
The 30 foot tall gnome will shoot fire out of an iron pipe in its mouth. All told, it will weigh between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds by Livingston’s estimate.
Livingston, who grew up in Worthington and studied art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the sculpture will fit in well at the festival because the figure is playful, familiar, kitschy and mythical.
Burning Man, he said, is “kind of like a secret garden. You go there and it’s like, you wouldn’t expect to see any of this stuff.”
Livingston, 50, makes a living in Greenfield as an electrical engineer, fabricator and designer; his work portfolio includes building suspended treehouses for vacation rentals in California, Georgia and the Smoky Mountains.
This is not Livingston’s first appearance at Burning Man. His first installation, which he received an honorarium for, was 2022’s “Shrine of the Macabre.” The piece resembled something like a telephone booth on long, spindly legs. Livingston said that creating art or helping build other people’s creations at Burning Man, which takes place in a desert environment with adverse weather conditions like high winds, dust storms and lightning, sets him up to be able to build almost anywhere.
Beyond that, he said, the festival’s leave-no-trace ethos reinforces the idea of community. “Being an artist, you kind of have an ego and it’s about you, but there, it’s bigger than yourself,” he said. “You’re trying to do something that’s not just about you, and so you’re only as strong as your crew. If you can’t build the [art pieces] together, then it just doesn’t really work.”
In fact, “Fire Gnome” isn’t a solo endeavor — the 18-person team building it includes Livingston’s family members and his girlfriend. He’s also recruited a few out-of-state volunteers — even as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico — and he welcomes more volunteers to join, too.
“I’ve been [riding] the coattails of others, I feel like, at certain points,” he said. “But now, I’m just like, ‘Oh, I’m doing this, and there’s no going back — which is fun.’”
And the grant, while significant, doesn’t cover the full cost of construction and transport to Nevada. In addition to volunteers, Livingston is also seeking community donations.
During a recent visit to Livingston’s workspace in Buckland, he showed off the Fire Gnome blueprints and walked through what the remainder of the build process would require. At the time of the visit, the steps that still lay ahead included cladding the frames, drilling holes, assembling the walls, staining the wood with non-toxic colors, hoisting sections up with a crane and bolting the structure in place.
“It’s quite the production to put it together,” Livingston said.
Yet despite all of that, the installation isn’t made to last. A few days before the festival ends, the Fire Gnome will be burned down in the center of a 200-foot-wide crowd of spectators at sunset. That aspect requires a lot of advance work of its own, including meeting with the fire marshal, consulting with Burning Man’s Fire Art Safety Team (FAST) and prepping the installation with diesel and gasoline on-site before the burn. The wood Livingston uses even has to be a certain thickness so it doesn’t flake into the air.
“It’s actually quite a lot of logistics, a lot of organization,” Livingston said.
Of course, it’s also a statement on ephemerality. “We build these things and we want things to last forever, but I think things are temporary, and I don’t typically build art that way. So it’s kind of, in a way, a big release, being able to let go,” Livingston said.
To learn more about Fire Gnome, donate to the project or volunteer to take part in the creation process, visit feedthegnome.art.
