In the early days of my sand sculpture adventures, while working on a big piece with lots of people, we usually ended up with a montage of many ideas as every sculptor tried to make a personal mark on the sculpture. The quality of work was also a montage as sculptors from many different skill levels were put side by side to work.
I always hoped that the sculpture would read as one thing and not just a collection of it's part but of course was guilty of the above; making my mark and being of questionable quality sculpture wise. Communicting with those around me to try and form some sort of flowing design could be quite difficult due to language barriers and the egos of the artists, myself included.
In the Danish projects in particular where the top was always architectural elements giving way, lower down, to everyone's individual style and conception. Most ended up as looking like decorated cakes but in the case of this one created in Falster, Denmark, I think it came together quite well.
No holes barred
Having such a big pile of sand to work with was inspiring and trying to give it an agreed upon composition equally so. With design meetings all being a bit double dutch I decided I wanted to try and make the biggest cut through ever and the team let me at it .
Making a hole so large in a sculpture this size wasn't really a done thing as it risked the entire piece. I had to be safe or very sorry but I was confident enough that I could pull it off.
I hit on the idea that if I made a composition inside the hole to give the sculpture support all would be safe as houses.
Another reason for wanting to make the hole was to give me some shelter from the awful weather and wind on the project. Giving myself a little cave to work in would be nice, although very dangerous. Having several tonnes of compacted sand fall on me is not how I wanted the story to end.
Structural engineering eat your heart out
The sand was pretty good actually and allowed me to go a bit crazy. You can maybe tell the whole top of the sculpture was resting on he figures. With sand you have to design in such a way that there will be supports to give the sands weight somewhere to go and with the two figures making complex arches I think it turned into a nice bit of engineering and a nice design element. It's all in the knees.
Once I carved my way out of the hole I worked down and added a few more element trying to make sense of the work around them.
Although the meaning of the whole piece is lost to me now I think it all came together quite well.
The sculpture took place as it was in the middle of nowhere and it was hard to find it's location to add this post to @steemitworldmap but with some clever photo analyses on my part I found it. It is interesting that in Denmark with sculpture projects like this there was the Philosophy that if you build it they will come and even though the weather was shite I heard that there we many visitors to the project on the southern point of Falster island.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use Steemit to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice. This will hopefully give it a new life on the steem blockchain. I am doing them in chronological order so there are many more to come.
I'm back after a two week stint of sculpting sand all over Ireland. So I haven't been able to post for a while much less enjoy the posts being created during the Steem down turn. Now I am looking forward to a bit more time to be back in my workshop and documenting more ephemeral sculptures here. Below are some of my recent posts.
Atlantis with tentacles - sand sculpture
Apathy (Part 2 sculpting) - sand sculpture
Apathy (Part 1 Compacting)- sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon.
@ammonite