Earth worm (NSFW, may contain nuts) - sand sculpture

For those of you who clicked on this post because it was tagged NSFW I welcome you, I think we have alot in common, wanting to see something which is not for the fainthearted or prudish. Maybe hoping to see a bit of flesh or something that will shock you beyond what you have seen before as you get more and more desensitised . I know you can handle nearly anything the internet can throw at you but proceed with caution, there are thing you can't unsee.

I'm sorry if this click left you are disappointed .Just another one of my sand sculptures but, let me tell you a story now that you are here.

A dark place

This piece stems from a weird part of my subconscious. A few posts back I mentioned that I had broken up with a girlfriend during a sand project and my mind was still in a strange place. it wasn't that I was sad or depressed, just a dreamlike state where I just rolled with it, no clue what I was doing and no reason to question myself or what i was doing. It's hard to explain, I suppose it was the gray area after a breakup, wondering if it really was over or if there was a possibility of getting things back together. Spolier alert 'no chance.'

I made this piece in Berlin, Germany as a small section in a demo pile. I never really got the concept of what the sand sculpture community call a 'Demo Pile'. It usually ends up as really big pyramid of montaged stuff with no overall design, often resembling a decorated cake . I never got what it was supposed to demonstrate.

luckily, Niall magee Fergus mulvany and myself were given a smaller satellite sculpture to work on and we tried to give it some sort of composition and thought process. That said we didn't really want to be working on top of each other so split the pile in three sides, giving us our own area to work but the piece would still have a unifying theme.

Strata

The idea was for each of us was to take a layer of the earth and see what we could come up with. Niall took the surface and plants etc. Daniel (or @ammonite as I'm known to my loyal followers) had earth, clay and Fergus rock. One other restraint we added was to have a human figure on each side depicting birth, life and death just to make it more complex for ourselves. Each of us could then go our separate ways and make it personal.

For my part, Soil, I thought worms would be a nice element to add as there is really not much else to speak of in this layer. It is a place where life goes to to be recycled into fossil fuels and with having death as a subplot worms would be a great fit..

I'm not going to sit here and explain the sculpture to you, because I can't. It just seemed to flow from my subconscious as I said and the physical me was just doing the grunt work. I brought up my recent breakup only so you can maybe see where my head was at.

I wanted to make a human figure being eaten by the large worm, like he is going to be dissolved back into some sort of rebirth. and going head first seemed like the direction to go. I didn't want to add clothes because as we all know they don't compost too well and bringing in another element like clothes brings with it other decisions to be made: what kind of clothes ; Y fronts or briefs, maybe even boxers. Too many decisions to be made in my dreamlike state.

So naked he was and if you know anything about male anatomy you will know that they have an appendage between their legs which there is just no getting away from. I will try to keep this post somewhat PC by using anatomically correct terms from now on.

Well, the penis, while in it's unaroused state can be quite flaccid (So I have heard) and when a man is upside down gravity takes hold. Unfortunately for my figure this gave it the appearance of an erection and due the rest of the composition led my audience to think I was trying to be humorous or sexually provocative. I really wasn't because as I said my Subconscious was in-charge but, this may have been his intention. As i continued to work the giggles form my audience grew stronger, pulling me out of my purple haze. I really didn't want this to be the focus of the sculpture and also didn't want to be seen as a pervert in public.

So I arrived very early the next morning and before anyone else was onsite and removed the penis and scrotum. I then did the extra carving work required to turn my figure into a woman.
As the day progressed I could hear the audience discuss and their mood was completely different. There was chin rubbing and intellectual conversation about how deep and meaningful it was. This was not my intention at all and I started to feel even more awkward. They were writing too much into this element which was meant to have no real meaning. it was the audience that were the perverts.

Strapadicktome

The following morning I return early again and gave it back it's manhood. How the hell was I going to deal with my mental state if people thought I was trying to create a work of art. I could put up with the giggles but not the people taking me seriously.
I did decide to make his new phallus a bit smaller, which I needed someone else to pose for and luckily the reactions become more muted so I could continue on and finish the sculpture.
At the end of his tail I made a little sperm coming out with the idea that from death, life continues on. Maybe in the end the sculpture was about sex but don't ask me.

Looking at it now I find it difficult to relate to this sculpture. It was probably something I needed to get out of my system. When all that energy was put into the sand I didn't have to carry it anymore. It all looked very heavy metal and aggressive but as the clouds in the sky as well as the clouds in my mind cleared I could move on.

Just to finish out this post I'll show what Niall and Fergus did on their sides. You will have to ask them what demons they were dealing with.



Fergus mulvany



Niall Magee

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

Welcoming Cyprus to the EU - sand sculpture

Frodo's Pepper Ghost - sand sculpture

Encyclopedias - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon.
@ammonite
[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 52.523661 lat 13.368193 long Earth worm - sand sculpture 2004 d3scr)