 I'm David Normal. I'm from San Francisco, California. I'm a visual artist. My work has always revolved around collage elements. While I do paint and draw, I use collage in the way that I think, so my thinking revolves around juxtaposition. And I have a strong interest in old sources of collage material, such as 19th century imagery. This is my first time at the British Library and my impression is that it's one of the largest libraries on earth. And I consider libraries really sacred places. I heard about the British Library's Flickr Commons collection from the guitarist of the punk band Flipper. I was looking for 19th century collage collection and I had a project underway where I wanted to use that type of imagery specifically. So it was really serendipitous. It was beyond my wildest dreams, really. I mean, unbelievable. I've always been drawn to 19th century illustration because I've admired the craftsmanship. The draftsmanship is exquisite. There's something about it that's so romantic. Those types of engraved images were the stand-in for photographs. So I used the gallery function of Flickr so that I could come back to them later. I wanted at all times to keep track of where these images were from so I knew which books they were from. I didn't want to just take an image and then have it be reft of its source material completely. It's almost very entrancing because you have to sit there and stare image after image after image and they kind of literally flicker by. The project for Burning Man and the intention to work with 19th century images existed in my mind before I was aware of the British Library Flickr Commons collection. Burning Man's theme for 2014 was caravansery. So it was decided to make something called a crossroads of curiosity and the idea was to take the notion of a cabinet of curiosities and expand it outward from the rectilinear arrangement of objects in a case to this series of tableau of human dramas, like a kind of collection of strange things and incidents that are occurring at a crossroads of experience. And so that's why we called it crossroads of curiosity. What I made for Burning Man was what I call an epic suite of paintings that were created at the original size of 3 feet by 8 feet. What made the epic though was that they were reproduced at a scale of 8 feet by 20 feet as light boxes which were then arrayed around the base of the Burning Man statue. The building of it was done by a team of carpenters and at a certain point the project really kind of left my control. The 4, 3 foot by 8 foot paintings were made in 10 weeks. However, the collages were done earlier. It probably took 40 or more hours on each collage. Overall, the reaction to my work at Burning Man was fascination. People were very surprised and perplexed by them. People were very eager to know what the images meant and to understand the story of them, to understand the symbolism of the images and understand how the different pieces related to each other and also understand how it related to the theme of caravansery. The fact that the images are separated from the books and so they kind of are on their own, out of context. And this creates this strong potential to reinvent them in a new context. It's very satisfying to actually touch the books. I didn't want to make a work of art that was simply a Burning Man genre piece so I specifically thought about how to make the pieces be their own world, their own statement, their own aesthetic. Working with the British Library's material was very empowering for that because not only did it give me this immense amount of material to work with, but it also gave me a point of reference to a different, a completely different institution. In that way the title, Crossroads of Curiosity, really was very self-fulfilling because it became a crossroads of two very different paths, of very different organizations.