Sandscapes: the story of sand
With its infinite expanses, its wild foaming luminescent waters, silky sands, and shell-studded shores, the beach has always been an endless source of fascination and inspiration for me.
I particularly love how the same beach can express so many different moods on any given day, morphing in minutes from a sunny disposition to a dark and stormy one, depending on the prevailing weather and moon cycles.
In 2012 I moved to the Northern Rivers and my love affair with the beach deepened as shoreline strolls became a weekly, and sometimes daily, ritual that would restore my sense of self and my sense of wonder.
During these walks I became enamored with the infinite beauty and delight of the little things, the detail and minutiae of the everyday that is so often overlooked. I began documenting these small treasures on my iPhone, including heart-shaped rocks, broken shells and iridescent jellyfish.
In early 2020, I started photographing the ever-changing and ephemeral patterns that appear in the sand. I was attracted to their abstract qualities, many looked like conceptual paintings.
It wasn’t until I started processing these images in Lightroom that scenes, mystic figures, landscapes and all manner of things started to appear. Rotating or re-colouring the image suddenly brought it to life. It felt like the silica in the sand (the main property in glass) had taken on a mirror-like quality and was reflecting the world around me, the micro reflecting the macro, reinforcing the connection we have with all living things on our planet.
I love how these fleeting fragments from nature inspire audience interaction and engagement, evoking strong feelings, sensations and impressions, something I witnessed when I started sharing these images on Instagram and Facebook. I was amazed at how many different figures and interpretations people shared.
Sand symbolises so many things in our culture, the passing of time, our impermanence. Formed from eroded rock, sand speaks to us of the relationship between the micro and the macro. It represents the duality of life, it can be silky, cool and comforting underfoot or cutting and relentless whipping across our bodies and faces during a sandstorm. Despite its homogenous appearance, every grain of sand has a unique beauty, which is evident when you magnify these amazing grains 300 times.
sand magnified 300 times
