Evolution abridged - sand sculpture

I should have really documented this one before my last posts on 'To the moon via the beach, Pt1 Pt2 but my dates got all mixed up. One of my cameras had the wrong metadata.

After a long absence from Copenhagen, sand sculpture had a new festival and I was so excited. I love this city and its people, so laid back and fun. The project was organised by the great Martin Tillinius who has sadly past away too soon. He was actually the one who gave me my start in sand sculpture one of the few project organisers who took sand sculpture seriously as an art form. So much so that he always gave the artists the time and the space they needed to create and because of this his projects was where the best work always happened. He was also one of the rising stars of Danish theatre, being an accomplished director and also having his own renowned theatre company 'Kaleidoscope'

The theme was something to do with a journey through time and I was asked to create a piece to start the ball rolling. They say the person who created time made lots of it and so to condense history somewhat. I wanted to take the first 13 billion years and represent it in a sculpture. Up to where I think Darwin could take over.

Now, I am no molecular biologist but I thought I could take a stab at showing what happened in these early days of the Universe.

The history of the Universe in one paragraph

What I figure happened was that Matter likes company and so from the very beginning, the Quarks were bobbing around looking for other Quarks to hang out with. Some fell in love and produced Hadrons who went on to form atoms. These soon got lonely and wanted to group together into molecules. Two Hydrogens invited an Oxygen atom into their relationship and the first threesome happened. ( I'm sure you are getting wet just thinking about it). As more complex relationships formed new communes sprung up. There was Thymine, Cytosine, Adenine and Guanine and they thought it would be fun to join forces but the whole thing spiralled out of control till a central religion of DNA was invented. This DNA started to exert control on the other molecules and atoms and started building towns and city to help spread the good word of 'Genetics'. Towns and cities had trade deals and realised that if they worked together they could take on and consume other competing states. Eventually, these systems got overly complex and a species developed that seemed to not understand how the whole system was so intertwined and was hell-bent on destroying it all for its own selfish needs.
The End, of the beginning

In the first section of my piece, I showed the formation of DNA from the smaller particles. Maybe not exactly as it happened but, I hope you get the idea.

The DNA (Or the Deoxyribonucleic acid as the nerds call it) flowed into the centre of a large ammonite like creature. As you can probably tell from my username I am fascinated by these creatures.

I think it is the spiral form that does it for me. It gives a very strong sense of movement although I have yet to decide if it is drawing you in or spitting you out.

Seamen

I was really having a lot of fun in peace and quiet making this sculpture. Well, that was until the Danish Navy decided to park a warship beside me and leave the engine running. Ah, Frigate! At least I think it was a frigate. The noise and the smell of fumes really was irriating. Finally, I had to tell them that I heard on the news that the US was thinking of invading Greenland and so they hauled up their anchor and off they sailed into the sunset.

The tentacles of the Ammonite morphed into a writhing mass of humans. The history was very abridged but I think it got the audience up to speed on what to expect for the rest of the exhibition.

I like the overall composition and the wat it flowed from one side to the other. It may not have been historically accurate but for me, it was more about the flowing of different forms of evolution into each other.

What a nice project. The light in Denmark is wonderful to carve by and it was fun to be that close to the centre of town while still being in a nice tranquil area with some of my fellow species.

alt

Ps

Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.