The Rock Balancer – Bridgeway, Sausalito, California

Bill Dan is a sculptor and performance artist specializing in rock balancing. He creates seemingly impossible, temporary balanced sculptures from un-worked rock and stone in public spaces near his home in Sausalito. Usually Bill Dan sets up shop on the weekends outside Piccolo cafe on Bridgeway.

Dan was born in Indonesia, and worked as a warehouseman before discovering the artistic possibilities of rock along the San Francisco Bay shoreline and his emergent skill in manipulating them. Bill was initially inspired by rock piles he had seen on the Big Island of Hawaii, the cairns of the Inuit, and later by the work of Andy Goldsworthy. In 2004, he was featured on San Francisco public television station KQED as one of the artists in a show entitled "Collaborations with Nature." Since then, he has been the subject of interviews and shows on TV stations in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, as well as other U.S. stations.

Bill Dan has frequently been asked about the "meaning" of his work, and he often replies that "Some people try to make things too complicated. This is the opposite."