Andas is a giant tortoise born in a desert dream and brought to life in Susanna Weinholt’s Oakland live-work studio. Andas means breathe freely in Susanna’s native language, Swedish. 

 It took a year to design and build the enormous sculpture, which features a room for “chilling” inside the shell and a teeter-totter for the neck. Andas debuted at the 2023 Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock desert.

 These images are from my neighborhood photo project, “Jingletown Works.”

Susanna and her creative partners, Dan (her dad), Ezra, Ashley, Aria, and Marcia, worked to the last minute sculpting clay, spray-painting fiberglass, and installing solar-powered lights.

To keep everyone going, Susanna went upstairs and made pasta.

Their biggest challenge was squeezing the four shell segments through the studio rollup door. After some precision trimming of the base and a lot of tricky maneuvering, Andas made it safely onto the truck for an adventurous journey to the festival.