Aside from water and air, sand is the most used natural resource, and we’re starting to run out.
What? Running out? How could that be when it’s actually the most abundant thing on Earth? Not all grains of sand are created equal, and the type of sand we need for our building materials i.e. concrete, glass, or silica are harvested from the bottoms of rivers or on beaches. The way in which we mine this sand has detrimental environmental impacts similar to oil fracking, where we are digging deeper and deeper into our limited resources and transporting tons and tons of it over obscene distances, destroying our planet at an extraordinary cost.
“The question isn’t really what’s going to happen when we run out of sand. The question is what’s going to happen when we run out of everything ... We know that we’re using too much freshwater. We know that we’re cutting down too many trees. We know we’re harvesting too many fish out of the oceans. We know we’re burning too much fossil fuel. And now come to find out we’re using too much sand. Well to my mind, these are not separate problems. They’re all symptoms of the same problem which is that we’re consuming too much, right? The way that we live here in the Western World and that lifestyle that we’ve now exported to the rest of the world, it just consumes way too many natural resources. And the planet simply can’t sustain it.”
I want to bring light to this issue - I don’t think it’s common knowledge that our supplies of usable sand are dwindling, that there’s a black market for it, that people’s lives are in danger just to get to the sand we have left. The demand for sand is driven by this Western consumption and idealization of living large and luxurious with little regard of how it impacts others and the world we live in.
I want the viewer to think about how quickly giant cities are being built overnight, and that we simply don’t need these large mansions or luxury hotels. I want to remind everyone that living large comes at an expense. We need to live smaller, we need to use less resources, we need to restructure the way we live.
Inspiration
I would not have known about the scarcity of sand without the enlightening 361st episode of 99% Invisible: Built on Sand. Here is a link to the podcast transcript, which you can listen to below. I am currently reading Vince Beiser’s book The World in a Grain so that I can learn more about the environmental impact that sand mining has.
Over the years, I’ve thought about and examined how light travels through and is reflected by glass. I am now left feeling indulgent in this exploration after knowing how the glass industry is another contributing factor to our depleting resources. Glass, nonetheless, has mesmerizing reflective properties and we can at least be conscious and thank sand for that.
In 2014, my friend Camille showcased her mixed-media painting which incorporated textiles and what I thought was 3M reflective paint. She explained that the canvas was covered with white painted numbers that had a layer of reflective glass beads, the material that is found in the road markings and street signs.
A Reflection of Self, Camille Reyes, 2014
I came across this material again when I saw Mary Corse’s solo exhibition at the Whitney. I’m interested in her approach, and how she is using the glass beads to create a perceptual, inner experience instead of an objective reality.
I’m also inspired by Aki Sasamoto and her spinning glass sculptures; the movement, the sound, the aesthetic of a vessel within a vessel. “When everything is lined up, it starts to have its own logic and I have no control over it. That’s another way for me to be dominated by objects. They start telling its own story.”
Process
For Limited Grains, I am fabricating a rectangular vessel in which two of the sides will be clear acrylic, and the other two will be white acrylic diffusers with an LED light array embedded behind it so that it illuminates the interior chamber. The light will create the white surface that the reflective glass beads will need to showcase their properties. At the bottom of the vessel, there will be a fan to create a whirlwind of bouncing glass beads.
The LED array will be composed of 8x 16” long WS2812B strips connected to a BlinkinTape control board. I will use madMapper to program the light animation to suggest a passing of time, with either a sweeping left to right motion, a radial sweep from the center, or a video feed of an hourglass timelapse (too on the nose?) I have purchased a miniMad controller which can save madMapper presets, and will upload the animations to it so the piece can stand alone.
As I will be traveling to the Sahara, I plan on bringing back the very sand that is so abundant but unusable for our modern civilization. I will create a secondary chamber that partially envelopes the glass bead vessel. I hope to create this juxtaposition where this outer chamber containing stagnant Saharan sand blocks the visible light, emphasizing the ephemeral experience within.
Here is a study for the interior chamber’s glass bead whirlwind.
