Saturday, February 4, 2017

Jewels Underfoot

I could feel differences when I touched the sand. To my eye, however, it all looked the same. I learned to let my fingers guide where I built a sculpture, taking up a handful of sand from several places on the beach. Through the years I learned where better sand tended to collect, although it was always moving around.

In 1995 I started screening sand to remove, mainly, shell fragments and seaweed. Accidents of availability led to using heavy-duty window screen for this, with openings roughly 1/16th of an inch across. For Venice Beach sand this worked well, most of the time.

There were times when filtering the sand was much more work because of a larger proportion of sand grains big enough that they wouldn't pass through the screen, and would block the finer grains too. This led to a belief that sand around the high-tide line was the culprit, and when I started doing multiple sculptures using that sand I made a different and more coarse screen to remove the shells.

The coarse screen used 1/8th-inch stainless steel mesh. Built quickly, it used MS polymer to bond the mesh to the PVC pipe frame. Late last year I was making a sculpture and the screen was showing signs of wear. Wire ends protruded from the MS polymer to tear up my hands. I started making plans to make a new screen.

I had plenty of the 1/8th-inch mesh on hand. But I also knew that I was still getting flakes of shell in the sculpture that caused little problems. I decided to reconsider the screening process. What, exactly, am I removing from the sand? Which of those things really affects the sculpture?

Acquiring a sample of what the filter retained seemed like a good place to start, so one day I went to Venice Beach, at low tide, with a filter. I ran about 40 pounds of sand through the filter and kept what remained after the fines washed out. That's when I realized I had no way to carry the sample home. This is one time when trash on the beach served a useful purpose: I found a cup.

At home, I put the sample of sand on a piece of 8 lines per inch graph paper, and added a metric ruler for good measure. I mounted the 50mm macro lens onto my camera and shot a few frames. I copied the files to the computer and opened one in the GIMP. The course of my life as a sand sculptor changed. Click on the image to see it full size.

Coarse sand, tiny shells, and shell fragments
filtered from Venice Beach low tide sand
Background grid 1/8th inch on center
Scale at bottom in millimetres
Click the image to enlarge it

I sat and stared at the screen, astonished. All the years I've been using sand en masse to make sculpture, I overlooked the particular. In addition to being a marvellously sensitive sculpture medium, sand is also beautiful simply in itself.

Since then, I have been taking macro photographs of more kinds of sand. I've also been photographing sand in situ, racing the waves at low tide. The colors, the shapes, the patterns still bring a sense of wonder.

Updated 2018-05-17 with better quality photograph