Playing With Sand

Playing with Sand

After considering what I should do after falling into a slump, I spent a long while just looking at my work. I had thought about looking at other materials to use that didn't fit into my category of unstable, but would still fit in with the theme of change. I thought about plastic bags, which look stable, but slowly disintegrate over time. I realised however that I didn't want to create a solid piece of work. I thought about creating a piece that represented change, rather that making something that would actually change over time, as that would enable me to continue experimenting with plaster. I wanted to challenge myself however, and decided to experiment some more with sand. 

I also decided that rather than trying to make a structure using unstable materials work, I would experiment with setting myself up for guaranteed failure.

Before this decision, and as part of a previous experiment to see how well sand would hold up when plaster was poured over it, I made a small piece using sand from an experiment before this. The sand had hardened, but from other experiments, I know that when moisture was introduced it was quick to fall apart. When I poured plaster over it, I found that nothing much changed, but you could see where the moisture had started to sink into the sand underneath.
I tried chipping out the sand so that I would be left with a shell of where the sand had been, but it had dried solid. While it did crumble away when dusted, I had trouble trying to chip it out of the plaster using a fork, so I left the sand in.

Out of curiosity, I decided to add on top of this experiment with more sand. It was awkward trying to get the sand stick to the surface, but it stayed eventually

Following my decision to make something that was bound to fail, I came up with the idea of making a tower using both plaster and sand, and introducing elements that would force the tower to crumble. My first idea with this was to simply pile the plaster and and on top, but then I realised that even if the sand was to crumble, there might not be as much change as predicted because it was a structurally sound object. I thought about changing the shape so that the structure would rely on the bottom segment to stay upright. Using wedges would mean that the structure would no longer be as strong because the plaster wouldn't have the chance to set over the sand, and none of the shapes would be the same either, so the tower could begin to lean unpredictably as it was being built. 

I would purposefully put a sand wedge at the bottom of the tower, as I know that it crumbles quicker than plaster, and sit it in, or introduce, water. If the bottom wedge was to crumble, the tower would undoubtedly fall. 

I had also built another tower using sand the day before, and didn't want to leave it to dry fully, as it would defeat the purpose of experimenting with unsound structures and materials.

As I was building the tower, it became increasingly difficult to keep the tower straight without breaking it, and I had to build it up using small amounts of sand so that it wouldn't crumble from the pressure I would have to apply to push it onto the tower. As a result, the tower was a lot looser at the top than the bottom, and was therefore more liable to fall is forced to.

I had the idea of pushing things into the sand until it fell, like a lot of children's games such as jenga and pop-up pirate. I thought it would be best to use twigs to do this, as it would be in-keeping with the theme of ever-changing I conducted the experiment twice.

In this experiment, I was purposefully looking for weak places in the sand tower, and pushing in the twigs until it fell.

I think that the most interesting part of this experiment was the result. The base of the sand tower in both cases remained standing, and the twigs protruding from what remained at different angles was interesting to look at.

From here, I plan to continue playing with the fragility of a material in order to bring about change.