‘Making Sand Castles’ took place on the beach at Sutton on Sea and commenced as the tide begins to retreat. I start to make sand castles using a child’s plastic bucket and spade. Each new castle was made using sand that had been dug out from a single sand pit. This pit is my starting point and return point. The work continues until the tide turns and begins to destroy my castles as the sea re-claims the beach. During the action the public will be invited to write a seaside memory upon paper flags. As I return to my starting point to collect the sand and fill the bucket I will collect a flag and insert it into a sandcastle.

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Making Sand Castles makes connections with the unique character of the East Coast resort, (the sea wall defenses, the beach huts & traditional seaside activities). The work is conceived purely out of my responses to the specific Sutton on Sea location. Making Sand Castles is conceived to be a form ‘extreme sandcastle building’. It is constructed to work with the natural forces of the tide and echoes and reverberates with the local character.

From the shoreline Sutton on Sea is represented by a concrete sea wall with a line of diminutive beach huts perched on top of and along its girth. This defence and the later sand defence dredged up from the Wash to protect the concrete wall is all that protects the town and surrounding area from the powerful nature of the sea. All this defensive work is in place to prevent the recurrence of the 1953 floods when the wall at Acre gap was breached, lives were lost, homes destroyed, livestock floated in the sea and two Sherman tanks were employed to plug the hole.

This work is a direct response to the nature of the environment. The concrete and sand sea defenses and the little town that sits below the defense influence the work. The human element is important in carrying out this work. Not only is the human creating and leaving traces, the person is also working with time. This is the period between the fall and the rise of the tide and the task undertaken between these two events. There is the idea that one is ‘playing’ out time and my time on the beach is a metaphor for man vs. nature and a wildness that threatens to engulf us. I am thinking about Canute who far from demonstrating that he could hold back the tide, sat upon his throne facing the tide to show that we are not invincible to the mighty waves.