Stones rolled in lively anarchy
through centuries of water grind
these hemispheres in softer stone.

I walk along a narrow ledge
of sandstone at the water’s edge,
and thought like water takes its own
shape in the hollows of the mind.

Gwen Harwood, from 'Littoral',1968

Growing up in Sydney, it was impossible for me to not be affected by the presence of the coast. The Sydney Basin is an ancient river valley, now a harbour. Port Jackson acts as the focal point of much of the identity of Sydney. It is the site of icons, the hypocentre of the city’s economy, the boundary line between the city’s primary subunits: The North and The South.

Starting at this central place, the harbour, in following the land’s edge between the water and the city, moving out “between the heads” to the Tasman Sea, the beaches revealed to the north and the south similarly act as cultural signposts but of a less formal kind, where the image is shed and beachgoers find a relationship with nature and a certain hedonism that can be more easily forgotten or suppressed amongst the concrete. From your first dip as a baby, a coastal consciousness clings like sand caught in your bathers, your shoes, your hair, your car.

It was this consciousness that inspired my work.Imagine a space filled with a number of ceramic bells, all different shapes and sizes, suspended from the ceiling in a line, and of hues varying from white to pink through browns to grey. This is the Beach Carillon. Upon closer inspection it is apparent that the bells are encrusted in sand, each bell with a unique type, and labels on the bells refer to beach names. The bells can be considered as a collection of “portraits”, each bell portraying a different beach. Each was created according to strict guidelines that can be decoded to signify features of the beach it represents. A primary motif is sand from the beaches themselves, which has been incorporated into clay and thus converted into a ceramic material. This initial exploration was undertaken as a pilot study, and has investigated sixteen beaches from Sydney’s Northern Beaches region, and produced sixteen resultant bells. They document a technical and conceptual initialisation for a much larger vision.

The Coast

In Australia, the relationship between the land and the people is particularly strong. The ancient culture which grew in this country placed the land at the very heart of its beliefs. Those who arrived from England in 1788, from the first miserable night in Sydney Cove through successive waves of immigration to the present day, did battle with the land and struggled to understand it. Australia, though, is pointedly not England. England is small, dense, the landscape is inhabited and contrived. Australia is big, empty, old, enigmatic. The European concept of centralism, from which traditions such as perspective, radiating town plans, circular temples and a fascination with the dome as an architectural feature, when exported to Australia provided the national myth of the Red Centre, the elusive, strange and romantic desert heart of a big island. The iconic status of the interior was, according to Philip Drew in The Coast Dwellers, a misreading by the new European inhabitants in their attempt to slot the strange new country neatly into their prefabricated philosophies. Moreover the centric myth was symbolic of an inward-looking cultural view which is no longer relevant. Drew writes:

The land itself [is] a catalyst which transforms the European mind. The inland focus is an attempt to invest European centralism with native content; outwardness implies new receptivity and willingness to grow and change. To take in what is before it. Hence, outwardness is a source of transformation. Without it, the Australian psyche will never inhabit its world. Whatever is meant by Australia as an idea, it is no longer centered in the interior empty heartland, rather, it is outside on the rind around the periphery of the continent. The persistent imagery of a dead centre will have to be replaced by the living edge if Australians are ever to come to terms with where they actually live.

And an estimated 90% Australians live near the coast. It is reasonable to assume that most Australians have had some kind of encounter with a beach, and of these a good proportion would be meaningful and significant. What then is our relationship to beaches? It probably has something to do with recreation, relaxation, making the most of our temperate climate and environment. More than this, going to the beach, as the last refuge of “nature” in the city, gives us the opportunity to shed some of the baggage of being a human in society, to reunite ourselves with the natural world and go feral for a couple of hours. People visit them to detox from urban life, to get wet, to pose or perv, to explore nature, to stretch their limbs and quieten their minds after the interminable chatter of the city, to find something elemental in the midst of the artifice.

Beach Carillon explores the cultural symbolism the coast embodies. It incorporates coastal geology into the work via sourced materials, which, through comparison, are given the opportunity to speak. The land is rendered readable by scaling it down into a digestible format, articulating it within the socially understood framework of art, and transferring it to a gallery setting.

The Bell

The bell is an ancient musical instrument and potent symbolic object. Historically, its use has been primarily for religious purposes, most notably in Buddhism and Christianity. When rung from a temple or church tower, it acts as the centrepoint of an aural radius which reaches the entire community and broadcasts a message to all who can hear it: “Come to church!”, “Alarm! There is a fire!”, “The King is approaching”, “The Buddha is present and your karma is cleansed”.

In Europe, these implicit messages were sometimes made explicit by inscriptions on the bells which were evoked like incantations when they were rung. Given that the bell itself was inaccessible to most members of the community, and consequently the inscriptions unseen, they carry an air of secrecy, as if they are the bell’s exclusive knowledge and private identity.

Beach Carillon adopts a similar practice but shares the incantation with the audience via a tag that floats beneath each bell. Inscribed on the tags is the name of the beach and a “memory”, which, when read in ensemble, forms a kind of poem.

FRESHWATER

I toll for perverts and parking inspectors

FORTY BASKETS

I toll for inverted dinghies and illicit dogs

CLONTARF

I toll for the swank and the serene

In Beach Carillon the bell is depicted as a representative of the beach, as its sibling object. Beaches and bells are both communal assets, and are prized as such in their ability to appeal to and unify the community. The sound of breaking waves is as evocative and penetrating as that of the bell. The tension between the competing archetypal Australian landscapes of the centre and fringe is reflected in the characteristic shape of a bell: the inverted bowl with a flaring lip on the periphery; the European dome and the Australian veranda.

Sand

What then of beach sand itself? The Carillon pioneered the use of beach sand as a constituent material in clay bodies, and for this to work successfully, it was essential to understand it. A beach is essentially a bank of particles affected by wave action. Where there is a conflict between water and land, both of them powers to be reckoned with, beaches are the most yielding buffer zone. To maximise the effectiveness of its role as energy-absorbent padding, sand is an example of successful compromise: it is a solid which flows like water.

Sand initially has its origin in a weathering of the coastline itself. A steady assault of water and wind breaks rock down into ever smaller pieces. Salts are dissolved, particles are carried away and the landscape changes shape. Once freed from the mass of rock, these particles take on a new role in the geological milieu, some becoming constituent materials of sand. On the beach, the mineral particles undergo a variety of other processes. They are churned by waves, infused with sea salt, fragments of shell, coral and algae are washed ashore, and the sand evolves accordingly.

A striking illustration of the scope of sand types can be seen between the neighbouring Palm and StationBeaches. Barrenjoey head marks the most northerly endpoint of metropolitan Sydney and is at the climax of a long, narrow spit running north/south which divides Pittwater from the Tasman Sea. The two beaches run parallel along either side of the spit.

At Palm Beach, facing east towards the sea, the only impediment to the view is the curvature of the earth; at Station, facing west, the view is the interior of Pittwater with interleaving heads of various shades of blue. Further differences between the two are apparent. Palm’s waves are large and violent, churning the sand with their currents. The wave, gathering momentum, forces the sand up in a plume which is then inverted and swirled in a tube as the wave breaks, turning the blue water to russet. Finally it comes to a cataclysmic, foamy conclusion, the momentum of the water carrying sand uphill onto the beach.

StationBeach is the antithesis of its neighbour. Its waves are small and almost tokenistic. Great swathes of weed are dumped on the beach by the high tide and left to rot when the water recedes, generating a stench which is perhaps the beach’s most immediately obvious feature. Whereas at Palm Beach only the most coarse and relatively heavy sand particles are given the opportunity to be deposited on the beach, here the water is not so authoritative, but rather allows fine sand particles to gently settle. As a result, the texture of the sands between the two is noticeably different. In addition, their colours also differ, presumably owing to a variety of influences such as the decaying weed, pollution and insular water currents of StationBeach as opposed to the newly-eroded mineral material and fresh ocean currents at Palm Beach. Palm’s sand is a striking red; Station’s is a fairly unattractive grey-beige.

What is the point of this story? No two beaches in the world have identical sand.The qualities of sand mirror the qualities of its home beach. Sand tells us about the beach’s topography, location, human use, and is as unique as the beach itself.

The Carillon seeks to dilute the all pervading anthropocentric nature of most of what we humans do. Beach-goers among the project’s audience might find in it something they had not noticed before because it was too big, namely the mighty forces of nature present in their own innocent playgrounds. I hope to stimulate an awakening to the uniqueness and subtlety of the landscape which we inhabit. In telling the story from the point of view of the sand, rather than the human, the time-scale is dramatically exaggerated. It is not a story of sandcastles being swallowed by waves but of millennia of erosion, not this year’s champion Iron Man but generations of all kinds of life forms, plant, animal and human. A poetic sunbaker becomes a speck rather than a subject.

Making the Bells

The uniqueness of beach sands, and the beaches that determined their characteristics, is represented directly in Beach Carillon. Each bell's size reflects the length of the beach it represents. For example, the 3.5km NarrabeenBeach translates to a bell about the size of a large flower pot, with a height and diameter of 350mm, and by contrast the 80m Shelly Beach translates to a tiny 8mm bell, not even the size of a thimble. The shape of the bell, specifically its degree of flare, has been determined by wave patterns. Standing on the shoreline of each beach with a stopwatch, I recorded the number of waves breaking per minute. The frequency of waves was calculated as a percentage of a minute and transferred to the embryonic bell plan as a percentage of its height. It was at this point that the convex dome becomes the concave flare. As a result the infrequent but powerful waves of the ocean-fronting beaches produce a more rounded bell, but the regular lappings of harbour-fronting beaches produce a more flared bell. Viewers have the opportunity to find relationships between the shapes and the qualities of the sand encrusted on them.

The processes of recording the alongshore length and wave frequency differ in their degree of scientific rigour. While the beach’s length is long term and landscape-bound, its waves are variable and sensitive to outside influence. This mirrors the capacity of the beach to act as a meeting place between environment and experience. The method I have adopted to record wave patterns is more like a diary entry than a definitive scientific calculation. It is a case of saying “On the day I was at WarriewoodBeach, the waves were like this”, speaking for the lived experience of the place as opposed, and in tandem, to its physicality.

When the bells are compiled, Beach Carillon can be interpreted as an idiosyncratic kind of map. Maps don’t present the world as it is, they represent a human reading of the world. Even a more conventional map, such as a street directory, while aiming to be a document of science and exactitude is in fact a cultural document which is composed of language-mediated signs, complete with the classic gulf between the signifier and the signified. Moreover, a map provides the venue for a dialogue between the codes. There is a layering of information. The codes for streets, the codes for railways, the codes for rivers, areas of forest, schools, places of worship, traffic lights are graphically superimposed one on top of the other. It is when viewed as a matrix, that a map becomes meaningful.

In Beach Carillon, the mapping is crafted partially by human hands and partially by nature. The fabrication of the forms, their size and composition is an artificial thing, but the sand itself is also laden with code: the geological composition of the areas, marine life, human habitation, the wave energy along the beaches as influenced by the topography above and below the water, the ocean currents and wind energy of the area. In this sense, sand itself can be decoded like a map too.

Testing the Sand

Initially, the body tests involved wedging sand into clay and seeing what would happen when fired. The more sand wedged into the clay, the shorter the clay body, such that bisqued pieces were crumbling to the touch. But it did produce some interesting results which allowed me to make an amateur analysis of the sand’s composition. An overall salmon pink colour indicated iron content. There was some unevenness in texture where particles of silicon had not entirely melted, some glassy molten shell fragments and some darker spots of iron or other oxide.

Application of glaze for experiment’s sake did not affect the colour of the clay body. It provided a glossy skin but was broken in places by the more pronounced particles of sand sticking out from the test piece which caused a feeling of lack of uniformity. Some eccentricity of the clay body, possibly the sea salt content, caused it to pinhole. Overall, glaze did not contribute significantly to the effect, and as such it was not pursued.

An alternative method proved more encouraging. The inside of a plaster mould was coated with sand and clay pressed into it. When fired to temperature the appearance and texture were truer to the qualities of the sand, and the clay body was stronger and denser than the wedging tests.

In addition it resolved any difficulty in fabricating precise forms as they could now be done with plastic clay rather than a shorter, more difficult body. Rather than press moulding, throwing the bells proved to be a quicker and more satisfactory method of production. Using slip as an adhesive, sand was applied to the bell forms when they became leather hard and then burnished and pounded to integrate it with the clay. It was important to gauge the correct amount of sand to apply because too little would leave bald patches, and too much caused shrinkage problems during firing, leading to shelling and dunting.

Compilation/Conclusion

In the space filled with bells, the systems present at beaches and the mythic significance of the coastline to Australian culture are in dialogue. Placing the bells in juxtaposition to one another provides the viewer with the means to find relationships between them, and subsequently in the landscape itself. It has been my aim to create something that people respond to positively and identify with and make discoveries. As the Alchemist said to the shepherd boy in Paulo Coelho’s famous story, “all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation”.

As previously indicated, this first phase was undertaken as a pilot study. A pilot for what? As became apparent during studio investigations, firing sand to high temperatures allows many of its more subtle qualities to become apparent, such as latent oxides producing unexpected flashes of colour and shell fragments melting to form a glass. Together with further investigation into these intriguing technical discoveries, the vision is to sample sand from every single beach in Australia and to fabricate bells which represent the entire coastline. Given that the beaches of Sydney alone clock in at around 120 in number, the task is not a small one. Parking tickets, intrepid hikes for kilometres in hilly coastal environs, tonnes of sand samples competing with sleeping space in the back a kombi van, a lifetime of work, a mammoth exhibition. It would, however, be the ultimate expression of the concept, the most accessible, satisfactory, and symbolically complete conclusion to the work.