Sand Project

Growing up in coastal New Jersey, sand was part of my life, part of my playground a place to relax unwind and commune with nature. Burring your toes, surfing the waves that were created by the shifting sands, and enjoying the communal feeling at the beach. The sand made up a big part of my formative years and still the place I feel most at home.

NJ commodified its beaches and made some inaccessible for the community selling off beach rights and charging admissions. It’s no wonder when there is erosion, they pay for offshore sand to be dredged and pumped back to the beach to create more sand to charge patrons to sit on dig in and enjoy. These dredging processes are not great for the local environment including fisheries and alter the natural ebb and flow of time.

As a photographer time has been an important part of my professional life. Some of the first measurements of time are though falling sand. As an adult living in Plymouth, MA we can measure the start of our nation with the first European settlers landing on the sand of Cape Cod and later setting up a settlement off the sands of what is now Long Beach and Downtown. The tidal swings on the MA coast are much more dramatic than the coastal waters of NJ with up to a 14 foot difference between the low and high tide height.  Watching the water come in and recede every 12 hours is calming way to pass the day. Sand from the Sahara desert travels across the winds and can be found as far away as the Brazilian rain forest.

Sand the building block for modern society. Sand acts as a natural coastal barrier.  We use sand in all aspect of the building process from leveling and tamping compressing the soil, the concrete and blocks that go into the foundation the final cladding of protective glass windows. With all this usage it’s no wonder that sand mining is big business and becoming an important finite commodity. The unregulated mining of sand is upending the natural world sand acts as a natural filter for drinking water aquifers and polluting ground water. The removal of sand from beaches around the world is exacerbating erosion and coastal damage.

This project aims to bring attention to the relationship society has with sand. The forms I create are made using glass and concrete, two building materials that have very different surfaces but are both derived from the same building block…sand. The sculptures have familiar forms that reference architecture, as the construction industry is one of biggest users of sand world-wide.