Oxfam Climate change sand video

One of the biggest winners out of all this Corona Virus pandemic is the environment. The air is cleaner, the sky is blue from horizon to horizon with the lack of contrails or chem-trails as they are called on the internet, the water in the canals of Dublin is so clean you can see all of the shopping trolleys and wildlife is having a field day. I heard the pigeons are starting a GoFund me for the endangered species called humans.
It is really quite sometime and how anyone can say that us dirty filthy animals aren't messing up the world is being proven a Silly Billy. I just hope that as we unlockdown humanity we will look at this as an opportunity to restart with more respect for the world we share with the rest of nature. If not I fear that we will all be doing this all again when the planet says enough is enough.

This is a sculpture I did in 2009 for Oxfam Ireland. They asked me to create a simple sculpture for a photo press call based on an advertisement they were going to air on television to get people aware of climate change. It was carved within a few hours for the shoot at 12pm and then I had the rest of the day to play.

I decided rather than just destroy the sculpture I would experiment with taking it down in a controlled creative manner. My nephew Nathaniel was on hand as a photographer so I set about carving away the figure to reveal flesh then bone and finally aaway to nothing, Nathaniel taking photos at each step. Then with a bit of creative editing I turned it into this animation where the figure comes into being. Finally, I got my wonderful wife who I had just met at the time to do the voice over.

I really did it as an experiment for myself. to try this technique out for future projects. Of course I gave a copy to Oxfam as a gift.

It was actually a fun little project and it was so nice to meet Mary Robinson who was the UN commissioner for human rights as well as one of Ireland's most popular presidents a few years before. I liked her in these roles and she was quite a character to meet.

Posing for the press didn't seem to be her favourite pasttime and she mumbled under her breath. 'Just take the bloody photo!' to the faffing photographers.
Years later I would see her in photos with the UAE princess Sheikha Latifa after she was recaptured trying to escaped her oppressive father. Mary said all was fine and dandy even though obviously it was not. (it is an interesting story should you decide to go down that rabbit hole).

The sand was pretty rough as was my quickly made sculpture but I think it got the point across. For me it was lots of fun trying to make the animation while considering how all these steps would come together in reverse. I really must experiment more with this technique.

Ps

For those interested here is a link to the original advertisement on the youtubes. I had only seen a still image of it when I tried my own interpretation.

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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.