Ask Any Mussel
Lying on the beach, nacreous and black in the low brilliant sunlight, is a common mussel shell. It's one of the millions cast up onto the slanting sand. Bean clams bleached white delicately mark the furthest advance of waves ending their ocean-wide eastward run. A few small wet pebbles dot the footprint-roughened sand. At my feet is a wealth of beauty unplanned, visible any day that I choose to walk down here.
Why do I make sand sculpture? The first ones were a response to the question "Is this possible?" Subsequent sculptures lived in a very odd place between routine and the impossible. I was never very comfortable with the idea but the cost was minimal in all ways, and I enjoyed it. Maybe the enjoyment was that simple and most basic aspect: touching sun-warmed sand.
Life hardened through the years. In 1987 I simply stopped sculpting. There were excuses: time taken up by other things, water dirty from the sewage treatment plants and street runoff.
There was some softening in the early 1990s, and my on-and-off photography resumed. I bought a camera I'd wanted in 1979 but couldn't afford at the time. That led to meeting the proprietor of a nearby photo lab, and our conversation turned, one day, to sand sculpture. I showed him my albums of photos.
"I want to photograph one of these. When will you make another?"
"Well, it has been a while."
"Let me know."
Could I even make one, after 7 years? I got the dusty equipment out of the garage, a simple task in those days, and headed for the beach. Motivated by Steve, the photographer, but by something else, too. One doesn't go down and do all that work just to please someone else, but it has been very hard for me to admit that there's something important embodied in the process.
Mussels make their lovely shells just by living. Amidst the clouds of judgment, planning, history, teaching and ideas is a ray of something simpler. Go and make a sculpture because I can.
Build number: none, complete collapse at about 98% completion (lifetime start #335); monolith on short riser
Title: none
Date: December 24
Location: Venice Breakwater, isthmus
Start: 1100, construction time approx. 3 hours to failure
Size: about 32 inches tall, 21 inches diameter, immersion screened native sand (Latchform, Rectascreenus, Waterscreen)
Helpers: none
Digital Images: none
Photo 35mm: none
Photo 6X7: none
Photo volunteer: none
Video motion: none
Video still: none
Video volunteer: none
New Tools: none
New Equipment: none
Visitors: none
Since the last sculpture a few days ago, the beach has been rearranged by very high tides. Retreating waves have dragged coarse sand down the beach and covered the fine sand, somewhere. I'll have to work with what's available. I've done it before.
The choices range between bad and even worse. I skim off the bad and use that to fill the form. Eventually the tide drops far enough--I'd had to time this one carefully to be able to finish before sunset--that I can dig a sample pit far enough to find good sand. It's under about 8 inches of coarse overburden. No time now.
I gauge the sunlight and stop filling the form when it lacks about a foot. Good enough. Although packed as well as I can the coarse sand just feels soft. I'll have to carve with that in mind.
The shapes run away with me, however. Just a little more... just a little more... define that shape, trim that one a bit, follow the line. Stability in a sand sculpture depends upon having enough cross-section area in the lower parts to support the weight of the top.
Somewhere during the trimming and refinement I remove that one key grain of sand. A crack opens toward the top. I polish it out, and then find another crack. Then a few more. While polishing those the sculpture collapses out from under my hands. It's a spectacular collapse, reducing the piece to less than a quarter of its originally organized sand.
Who's to blame? Sand is as it is. I did my best but overestimated what it could hold, and weight trumped damp sand's grip. No blame, but an old lesson reinforced. The first formed sculpture I ever did, in 1983, started cracking for the same reasons but the silt in that lake sand held it together. Beach sand is less forgiving.
This one simply collapsed all around. Other sculptures have had elements fall off and knock off anything below them. Knowing why things fail is important, but judgment is not part of it. I need to know why so that future sculptures will remain standing.
So, no blame, no judgment. I load my equipment back onto the cart and start walking north in the afternoon sun.
2015 December 24
2016 January 1
