These Petaluma artists create 60-foot pieces just to watch them burn

Some artists make work to preserve memories. Others create to make a statement of beautify a space. Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti make their art to burn.

Acclaimed photographers, sculptors and installation artists, Garlington and Bertotti have been making art together since 2013. Bertotti met Garlington in 2012, much after Garlington had dabbled with various mediums of art and narrowed down to large sculptures after a trip to Burning Man.

Now, when the couple isn’t building for the annual festival, they’re capturing attention on eastern Petaluma hillsides with some of their massive artwork, including one pandemic-era creation dubbed “Temple of Harvey.”

Made of wood, straw, water and the very adobe mud it stands on, the “Temple of Harvey” was a quarantine project, taking four months to build.

“We were commissioned to work on this grand art installation for the Burning Man for which we had bought a whole lot of wood,” said Bertotti. “But then the pandemic hit, and the wood just sat there in the sun. We knew we wanted to do something with it, we just weren’t sure what to do.”

The art structure is partly a homage to the 1950 film, “Harvey,” in which the protagonist has a giant invisible rabbit best friend named Harvey.

“When are you not allowed to have an imaginary friend? We want people to keep the child inside them alive,” Garlington said. “We want them to let their imagination run wild. Let the imaginary friend live on.”

Garlington said he has “art in his genes.” Growing up in a darkroom, at the back of his parents’ black and white photo lab in San Francisco, he learned how to “pretty things up” and add “emotion” to simple two-dimensional black and white prints.

His father always told him that he would learn best on the road, and that is exactly what happened. Dropping out of high school, equipped with an unconventional college experience in the form of a Eurorail Pass, Garlington took off on his adventure to travel and capture Europe through his camera lens.

Back from his journey through Europe, Garlington was desperate to get out of this darkroom and started sticking his photographs on his car in an effort to get people to notice his work.

Garlington even road-tripped with groups artists - a couple of musicians and a writer - to drive his “photo car” from Petaluma to New York City, stopping every now and then for a live exhibition.

“We would keep driving around the Guggenheim Museum till we found an open parking spot. Once we found one, we would park there and naturally attract the museum visitors who thought we were a part of the exhibits,” Garlington recalls. “When people back home asked, we would say we had a show at the Guggenheim Museum.”

Looking for a new way to make art, Garlington came across local artist David Best who invited him along to work on a temple he was building for Burning Man.

“I was immediately hooked. I didn’t know any other place in the world that built art so big only to burn it,” said Garlington.

Building 40-60 feet wooden sculptors takes time, and a lot of help.

“It started with building a temple and the next year I came back to build the infrastructure for Burning Man, I brought my camera with me,” Garlington said. “I started photographing all the people who built the cities and then I started covering their cars with the photographs I took. That made me real popular real fast.”

That’s when he met Bertotti. And for Garlington, the timing couldn’t have been better.

“I was creating such big things in a field I was new in,” said Garlington. “I needed an additional voice, someone I respected, someone I could bounce off of ideas on.”

With a degree in biology, Bertotti graduated from college and ventured into physical healing arts. Coupled with her knowledge of the human body and interest in therapy, Bertotti started experimenting with sculpting as a sort of therapy.

When she moved to Petaluma in 2011, she was one of the many onlookers fascinated with Garlington’s photo car, but was unable to meet him. She later visited his photo studio in downtown Petaluma, but didn’t see him. Finally, she met him at her first visit to Burning Man in 2012.

Their first big project together was for Burning Man 2013, where Garlington was awarded the Honoraria to build the Photo Chapel.

Established as sacred space of reflection and prayer, all of the artworks at Burning Man have been massive, incredibly intricate, wooden structures. During the week of Burning Man, the temples are adorned by participants with memorials and inscriptions. The structure is burned in a cathartic ritual to inspire healing and community.

“There is something neat about smallness and photo prints. But there is something to be enveloped by the art, to walk through a portal into your own work, to walk into this mystery,” said Garlington.

The Honoraria they worked on for Burning Man 2015, the Totem of Confessions, is one of their favorite pieces. It was here that they figured out a lot of their work methods and spent countless hours immersed in the art they were creating.

“We were working every day from like as early in the morning as we could get up till like the evening just to get it done,” said Bertotti.

Standing at 60 feet, the work to five months to complete and it remains the largest piece the couple has made.

“We started off with a plywood structure and covered it with ornate designs- kind of like wallpaper,” said Garlington. “And then you add a layer to it, and then another one, and then another one till you reach a point where you have made a pop-up world.”

Garlington works on putting together the external structure, while Bertotti is the one responsible for all the details.

“Once the structural component is in place, it’s way open to interpretation. Then we can just go wild. And I love that- the newer ideas that come in and sometimes even surprises us,” Garlington said. “There’s no wrong- if you don’t like something aesthetically you can just tweak it.

The theme of the Totem of Confessions was animal saints, so instead of the halo on the human saints, the halos were on animals.

“One night, we were staying at the art studio, Natalia pulled an all-nighter working on the inside of the totem,” said Garlington. “I came down in the morning and Natalia had done this whole like collage of elephants circling the room and oh my god, it was really kinda striking. It was like one of those moments where it finally struck us that okay, we’re really going to make this thing. This was going to work. It’s quite something – the inside was just like – it blew people’s minds. Like the outside was great and all and then they went inside, and they just couldn’t believe it.”

Watching five months worth of hard work reduced to ashes may seem unfathomable, but Garlington and Bertotti find solace and a sense of closure in seeing their work go up in flames.

“It’s not disappointing to watch it burn because we will always have it with us thanks to the internet and photographs. We don’t need to physically carry it around – it’s always with us,” said Garlington. “In fact, it lasts with us and the audience longer because of the impact it creates when you watch it burn.”