What vacation do you dream about in January? Warm sunny beaches? We took our vacation in Toronto, Canada, where the temperature was as low as -11ºF. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. What motivated us to go there…in January??
We traveled to the chilly north with the Flaming Lotus Girls, a collaborative artists group based in San Francisco. We have been volunteering with FLG for about a year, helping build large scale metal and fire sculptures. For this installation, we spent about 3 months refurbishing a piece originally built in 2005, called “The Angel of the Apocalypse”, an abstract bird, a phoenix if you will, rising up out of the ground. This included rebuilding the body, on which Joe spent many hours plasma cutting and grinding mild steel (the original body was made out of drift wood and burned at the end of the 2005 installation). Carol redesigned the eyes, turning them into faceted gems that would reflect the city lights as well as the fire that would be blazing behind them in the head.
Fire attracts people like moths to light, and our fire sculpture attracts people with its beauty, providing warmth to body and spirit. One of the main features of FLG installations is interactivity, meaning that anyone can operate the fire effects, in this case by pressing a button. It is awesome to see the joy on people’s faces when they realize that they have set off a huge ball of fire, and the look of glee is the same whether the person is 8 or 80!
Toronto is a friendly city with plenty of fun, I would recommend visiting…maybe in the summer…
