Apathy (Part 2 Sculpting)- sand sculpture

Welcome back or hello to my new readers. This is part 2 of a two part post documenting our 2002 Dublin castle sand sculpture exhibition. You can catch up with the first part Here
Or

Previously on Apathy.

'Lets make a sand sculpture Exhibition'
'How will we pay for it? Ok, we'll fund it ourselves'
'Where will we do it? Dublin Castle looks good'
' Oh no we need insurance. 'Don't worry Tommy's got you covered'
' Lets get this show on the road. '
'It's fake news, I tell yeh!
'Phew, Compacting is hard work'

Mr. Miyagi

Where was I? Oh yes, we were starting to carve the sculpture.

When you start there are many unknowns about the sand and compaction quality. This is a reason why I don't really design my sculptures and prefair to just start with a concept and see where it takes me. Why spend time thinking and planning a very complex sculpture only to realise that the sand won't allow you to make it.

Another direction to take is to do a bit of test carving on top, then you can design based on what this test reveals. I don't know why we started to make this little character but he was a good test of the sand especially when his head fell off. Now we knew how far we could push the sand and continued to work down

From top to bottom

When people see a finished sculpture they usually don't understand how the whole thing is carved and wonder how did we get to the top to carve that sand. As you now understand we always start at the top and work down exposing the sculpture from the solid block as we go. The wooden forms give us something to stand on as we work.

Working as a team we divided the sculpture into areas where we each could work and not have to play twister with the others. Nialls brother Alan joined us and we decided to each take a side and make a character along with a main central structure. Which leads me on to to idea behind the piece.

Rotting core

In the early years of this century Ireland was enjoying a time of plenty. There were many riches to go round due to the fact that the banks were printing money like nobodies business and lending it to anyone who would take it even if the prospect of them paying it back was slim. All this went on under the cataract eyes of Politicians.
This debt based utopia looked great on the surface but, dig a little deeper and society was crumbling. House price were going through the roof. The medical system was going through the floor and greed and racism were showing an ugly side of the irish which I am not proud of. As you can probably tell I was not too fond of these times.

Our sculpture was about this apathy in the Irish people. Each of the characters in their own little world with their back to the rotting core that was supporting them. Quite a cheerful piece really.

I made the girl in a dress looking vacantly into the distance.

Fergusssssss' piece was more abstract with his figure throwing their head back in ecstasy like she was partying while Rome burned.

Alan's seemed to suggest that she was just ignoring the situation by hiding her head in her hands.

And Niall' showed an old woman pretty much just giving up.

The core itself was abstract, like some sort of mechanism with we all rely on but are letting disintegrate without care.

Comeuppance

As with most countries around the world who let their bankers (Spelt with a W) destroy their economies through greed the Irish banks also collapsed but of course the government bailed them out with tax payers money. What have we as a country learned from the 2008 banking crisis? Absolutely nothing, I can see us the same crap happening again.

The end of the begining

For us seeing the amount of interest from the public was great. We saw the same people come multiple times to see how the sculpture was developing and strangers from all walks of life could be heard giving their thoughts on what the sculpture represented. We had most of the newspapers and TV stations doing items on it and were very proud of our success. It showed a thirst for this type of Public art.

Of course the castle was elated. They had to do nothing and the visitors just poured in. Tommy (the guy who gave us permission to use the courtyard) was very happy to have taken the risk with us and finally when we had cleaned away all the sand he asked how much did we spend on the project and insisted on covered all our expenses. I said it before and I'll say it again. A true gentleman.

So, what have we learnt from this project? That there was a great interest in the Irish people for sand sculpture and that as a location the castle was perfect. Tommy was also eager to have us do it again and helped point us in the direction of possible funding opportunities.

Immediately upon finishing we started to plan again for the next year.

Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steemit to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice. This will hopefully give it a new life on the blockchain. I am doing them in chronological order so there are many more to come.