“I thought, what would I dedicate a temple to if I was building one?” sculptor David Best asked himself more than twenty years ago. He had recently built a kind of hodgepodge abstract sculpture in memory of a friend who had been killed on a motorbike, and at Burning Man, the annual festival of art and imagination in the Nevada desert, in the presence of friends and colleagues, set it afire. Those who were part of the ceremony asked him to build a temple for the following year’s event.

The temple he decided to make was also constructed of pieces of light wood. This time more than ten people wrote on slips of paper the names of loved ones who had died and placed them inside the structure before they set it on fire.

Currently Best is in Warwickshire, England, finishing a piece called Sanctuary, to commemorate the lives of British people lost to Covid. Sanctuary is a cross between a building, a labyrinth, and a sculpture. It has the laciness of the Eiffel Tower, the delicacy of origami, and the beauty of a sacred space.

Over the course of a week, people will be invited to enter the construction and leave notes, photos, or objects in honor of those who have died of the virus.

And on May 28 Sanctuary will be put to flame, taking with it grief, attachment, outrage at all the pandemic has taken, and many other complex feelings. It will also lift awe up to the night skies.

—Trebbe Johnson