Sand For Now, a film by Katherine Pettit

Inspiration

 

I have always been interested in making films about artists due to my background in visual arts.  I was looking for a topic for my next documentary when I had heard of a sand carving competition taking place in Harrison Hot Springs, which was only an hour and a half from Vancouver. I was intrigued. I visited the Harrison Hot Springs World Championship website and saw that it was a major event taking place in September which was only a couple of months away. Photos of all the winning sculptures over the years are posted on the site and I was very impressed with the work.  I thought the art form of sand carving would be a great topic for a documentary film because little is known about it.

My strategy to contact the sand carvers was to first approach the Canadian artists. There were a handful of carvers across Canada with websites showcasing their work. Sandemons is a group of sand carvers located in Vancouver led by David Billings.  I contacted David first, and he informed me that he was traveling to Belgium in a few days to work on a sand event for the Sandaholics, a Dutch company that hires sand carvers to work on commissioned events.  We met for lunch and he showed me the sketches and plans for the project. I was hooked when he told me the site included a sand pile the size of the football field with over fifty other carvers from around the world. He further informed me of the scheduling details, and when our lunch concluded I booked tickets for the crew and myself to Europe.

Belgium

So on July 4 of 2004 we traveled to Belgium and we began our investigation on the sub-culture of sand carvers.  Our first location was Zeebrugge Beach, Belgium where there was a major sand carving event with a “Hollywood” theme. I was amazed when I walked on the site and saw the Empire State Building, thirteen metres tall, made of sand.

The first detail I learned on the site is that there are many skills and techniques necessary to be an adequate sand carver because the medium is so very fragile and unpredictable.  The most important step is to pack the sand densely with water in a wooden or plastic form.  Densely packed sand is easier to carve and less likely to collapse.  Each artist has a preference for the tools (s)he uses, but they are usually inexpensive, simple palette knives ranging in width and length.  With densely packed sand and a few inexpensive tools, these artists create grand illusions by manipulating light and shade, to create deep, hard shadows in the sand sculpture.  The medium and the tools needed to be a sand carver are inexpensive and therefore accessible to almost everyone, allowing this to be a non-elitist art form.

While I knew impermanence would be a major theme to explore in the film due the obvious characteristic of the instability of the sand medium, I became increasingly interested in the community sub-culture of the sand carvers. I started asking questions on why and how the artists traveled around the world, carving sand professionally.  They work twelve hours a day in the beating sun and storming rain.  Despite the obstacles of drastic weather conditions, group politics, and families living elsewhere, enduring these experiences as a group gives them an unbreakable bond.  The sand carvers deeply enjoy collaborating with their close-knit nomadic community. I realized that if I wanted the documentary to accurately portray this world that I would have be a nomad and travel with them.

 

Quebec City, Canada

So the next location was Quebec City. As Canada is such a large country with its diversity of English and French speaking provinces I felt it was important to represent both the east and the west coast.

 

In Quebec there were several competitions occurring in August, and I chose the well-known family-run Expocite International Sand Sculpture Competition in Québec City, organized by Michelle Lepire, and his wife Charlotte, which included twenty carvers.  It was a unique contest because the prize money totaled the unusually high sum of $28,000 making it very competitive among highly skilled carvers.

While Zeebrugge showcased sand carving as a Pop Art discipline, the work in Quebec is reminiscent of the characteristics of the Happening/Performance Art movement. Fifty thousand people walk through the tent while the carvers are working on their sculptures.  The carvers are performing for a mass audience and they are very much in the public eye for this competition.

Harrison Hot Springs

The next and final location was Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia.  Harrison is host to the World Championships with over eighty carvers from around the world attending.  As the last stop of the circuit it became much easier to focus on the key artists with follow-up interviews.

 

Harrison Hot Springs represents the Process/Earth Art characteristic of sand carving because this is the only location where sand from the actual site is used for the sand sculptures. In Zeebrugge and Quebec City the sand was trucked in from another location, it was cleaned and processed to make it consistent. But at Harrison, many artists picked out beer bottle caps and found the sand to be inconsistent.  As they dug deeper into the plot, the sand became dense and clay-like. Rather being frustrated, the artists would use the dense sand to enhance their sculptures.

Post-Production

It was very important for me to make a film that was not a one-dimensional portrayal of sand carving.  I wanted this film to be about the artists because I found the people to be so intrinsically intriguing when I interviewed them for the film.  The artists have very fulfilling lifestyles; they are free and living in the moment with profound inter-relationships.  I wanted this to be a film about artists whom everyone identifies with. This is not just a film about sand carving; it is a deeper story sharing intimate moments of people who are artists.

 

Sand carvers live happy and free lives on the margins of society because their work is uncategorizable, non-permanent and their community consists of close-knit nomads. It was my hope in creating this film that the message that the sand carvers share on the struggle to be free will be a positive inspiration to all audiences.