I was back in Duncannon again for the yearly sand sculpture festival. It is a whole festival that grew up around the sculptures we do there. Starting as one small sculpture on the beach it has grown to include a parade, a fireworks display and lots of live free music.
Our sculpture is inside a tent on the beach which allows them to charge an entrance fee, it is the main money maker of the entire festival.
For me, I don't really think it is worth what they charge. They have us sculpt for around three days and in that time of loooong days we can only do so much. Even though we have been doing the job for many years the organisers do little to help make our job easier or better. No matter what advice we give about preparing the site for us we usually spend half a day getting ready to carve. The sand is always just dumped in a big pile inside a tent and then we need to use shovels to spread it out into different areas and then wait until they can organise water for compacting. This is every year the same and the sculpture suffers.
This is how we find it, a big pile which we first need to separate to create a path. To make matters worse the tent is a farmers poly tunnel used to grow plants. With the sun shining and no air going thorough it becomes a furness inside and as sweat pours off our naked bodies we dig our way through. We have started calling it the bikram sand sculpture festival. Sadly the organisers never learn and no matter what we say to them to improve things I know that next year will be the same.
This all sounds like a negative way to start a post but, to be honest I still love going because the village is lovely and the people are great fun.
The theme of this years festival was The Wizard of Oz. First it was a famous book written by Frank Baum and than made into a film in 1910, That was a black and white silent film which was pretty weird but most will remember it from the 1939 remake staring Judy Garland with added colour and sound.
Having just 2.5 days to turn it into an exhibition you will have to Forgive the roughness of some of the carving. There were three of us, The two Magee brothers Niall, Alan and myself.
I worked on the big logo from the film. I thought it best to have something big and really spelling out what the whole exhibition was about. Up top I had the emerald city and down the bottom I had the four main characters following the yellow brink road.
The logo looked pretty nice but as you can see from this closeup of the little adventurers there wasn't much time for detail.
I also threw in this less than wonderful wizard of Od as a space filler. Made very quickly in a hour or so it wasn't very special although, I did like the texture I gave his face by using my finger prints.
As I said from all the issues and frustrations I have with this project It is so nice to still have a yearly project in Ireland. There is no place like home. There is no place like home.
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.
Surfer - sand raking
My introduction to sand raking - Foot prints - sand raking
Mother Earth - sand sculpture
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