Sandwork

Growing up in coastal New Jersey, sand was a significant part of my life. The sandy beaches provided a playground, a place to relax and unwind, and an accessible platform to commune with nature. Surfing the waves that were created by the shifting-sands beneath the ocean’s surface and burying one’s toes in a smooth embankment along the water’s edge were daily summer pleasures of my childhood. These formative experiences still resonate today, rendering beaches the places I feel most at home.

Today, sand is a basic building block for modern society and a critical feature of the natural environment, acting as a natural costal barrier and water filtration system. Sand is used in all aspects of the building construction process – from leveling, tamping, and compressing soil, to the concrete blocks that go into the foundation, to the final cladding of protective glass windows. With all this usage, it’s no wonder that sand mining is big business and sand is an increasingly important finite commodity, while the unregulated mining of sand threatens to upend the natural world, exacerbating erosion and coastal damage.

As a photographer, time has been an important part of my professional life. The hourglass – one of the earliest devices to measure time – uses falling sand to convey time’s passage. The shifting of sand in the natural ebb and flow of the ocean and the temporal relationship of the tides has always been very important to my work. Sand from the Sahara Desert travels across the wind, and researchers have found it in locations as far flung as Miami, Florida and the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Photographs are measurements of time, and making photographs is all about capturing moments in time, measured in one-hundredths of a second. Sculpture also captures time, rendering an object essentially timeless in three-dimensional space.

This project aims to bring attention to the relationship society has with sand. The photographs I produce capture beach scenes and foreground sand in new ways. The forms I create are made using glass and concrete, two building materials that have very different surfaces but are derived from the same base material…sand. My sculptures contain familiar forms that reference architecture, as the construction industry is one of the largest consumers of sand world-wide.