In November of 2019 I submitted a formal proposal along with this animated video https://thinking-stoneman.blogspot.com/search?q=handhenge to the organizers of Burning Man proposing the idea to create a large dry stone installation in the Nevada desert, titled Handhenge. The 100 ton, mica schist structure was to be built in August of 2020 by a handful of North American wallers, including myself, five days prior to the actual nine day event, and then taken down and removed completely, afterwards. 

When I think back on it now, the improbability of the design, and the likely hood of successfully organizing and completing such a massive undertaking on schedule, makes me smile. No doubt it would have been (excuse the pun) way too much of a 'handful'. And so it I was with some relief that I read a couple weeks later, the letter from the Burning Man committee saying politely our idea had been rejected. Ironically, almost as if the universe wanted to make sure we didn't go there to the desert and fail spectacularly, the entire Burning Man event had to be cancelled for that year because of Covid.

The short animated video Handhenge visualization itself took a long enough time to make, That should have been a clue to what we might have walked into.  I did have fun writing the proposal though. In a way the concept was such a 'fitting' structure,  in terms of reflecting Burning Man's basic theme of extravagant impermanence. The wording, while at times seems in retrospect a bit bombastic, does presents a number of contrasting concepts involving our relationship to stone throughout history.

Handhenge will be erected by an international group of skilled stone workers to simulate an ancient stone circle which will consist of ten dry laid columns, created to look like the fingers of two hands, reaching upward through the desert playa. Instead of using single, monolithic boulders, the free-standing columns forming the ten fingers will be created with many, smaller, (multi-mini-lithic?) random-shaped chunks of mica schist stone material...

The visual link connecting such a variety of dissimilar shaped stones into the constrained parameters of specific human form, will be immediately apparent as one approaches the structure*. This unique piece of land art invites those who enter, to experience a crossover from a rather unfamiliar inanimate world to the familiar animate shape of human hands, but on a monumental scale...

The 'anthropro-metamorphic' nature of the stone 'fingers' forming the enclosure becomes an obvious theme within the Handhenge experience. Small human hands have transformed many tons of stones to form two monumental hands. The feeling of permanence, usually associated with such an ancient looking stone circle as this, is dynamically contrasted with the temporary status it will have -- as does everything at Burning Man. So many of the other structures in this ephemeral desert city are slated to be consumed by fire, and the message of impermanence of it all is felt and witnessed. However, poignancy of knowing these giant stone hands embracing the beholder, will also soon crumble and every trace of stone removed, leaves us in a state of uneasiness. Handhenge due to its obvious fleeting quality and the immediacy associated with all dry stone construction process, conveys a sense of noble futility...

The reaction to this massive ‘slight of hand’ is one, not just of wonder (at the futility of it all), but hopefully one of quiet acceptance.

The idea of huge dry stone hands reaching out from the desert plane, is not that easy a concept to grasp. It may well have been be even more difficult to have build.  On one hand you have the momentousness of the 'momentary' and yet on the other, a jig saw 'minimization' of the monumental.