Master craftsman, artist, sculptor, glass blower, landscaper, and welder Duncan John Mackenzie works in many different mediums. While Mackenzie's talents are many, this album showcases his talents with iron, steel, grease, wood, and fire. The chief builder of the Telluride Burning Man community's iron and steel grease bomb apparatuses, and overseer- often along with Anton Viditz-Ward- of the construction and subsequent burning of the community's 'burn towers,' Mackenzie has a quite literal knack for giant explosions and towering infernos.

Heating grease to its vaporizing point over a large bonfire, and then tipping liquid into the grease via a long armed dipper results in a magnificent coming together of the elements, and produces a giant explosion- sometimes as high as thirty feet or more into the air. In a similar vein, Mackenzie and crew also construct deliberate towers out of reclaimed and donated wooden materials ranging from plywood sheets and wooden beams to kitchen chairs and parts of former art projects.

These towers are built as high as Mackenzie and crew feel to go on a given day. Participants are encouraged to put their own personal items into the creations and thereby into the eventual fire, offering them up for a symbolic transformation of sorts, shedding some part of themselves and making way for the new. Once the sun goes down, the towers are ignited in a tradition as old as humanity itself. Participants and onlookers become one and cheer excitedly as flames erupt into the night sky and the community celebrates...

To learn more about Mackenzie and his work in all of its shapes and forms, please visit his website by clicking here.

Click here to view Mackenzie's Burning Man Proposal for 2010, Human Interactive Sundial.

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