Mummified - sand sculpture

Say what you like about the ancient Egyptians , they really knew how to bury their dead well, their rich ones anyway. 5000 years later and their tombs are preserved like the day they were shut off to the word. It's amazing how this ancient civilization seemed to have such a grasp of such things.

Mum's the word

For the 2005 Brighton sand sculpture festival I was asked to make a mummy scene tucked away in a corner of the site.
it was an unusual arrangement of sand with one big compacted block at the center and a few loose piles of sand around it.
The first thing I did was to direct a digger driver to rearrange the loose sand to give it a more intimate setting.

As a back drop I made a roll of papyrus with illustrations, like a step by step of the process of how to make a mummy.
At it's center I went large and showed some hands doing the final wrapping of the dead body.
Nothing deep and meaningful here but I liked to approach of not just making a mummy, instead giving a little bit of a story to the scene.

@stijgerart and Edith Van der Wetering were next to me and we blended our stories together. They took the figure and continued the tale to the after life.

7/7

The most notable thing about the project was that while working away on our sculpture we got word that there was a terrorist attack in London where many were killed in underground and bus suicide bombings. It would become know a 'The 7/7 attack' . It was all a bit surreal to be here making a sand sculpture while not too far away a city was in turmoil. So many people dead and we were having fun on the beach. This war on terror had made every city a battle ground and we were all targets because of the colonial actions of our governments but, I digress.

I really liked working big and used, for the most part larger tools, making big rough cuts in the sand. Working on this scale didn't call for much detail.
It was a fun project except for this cloud of uncertainty hanging over England but you really have to just do as you are doing or else the war is lost, not by one side or the other but by all the victims stuck in the middle.

The victims of 7/7 are replaced by victims of the next imperial war and unfortunately unlike the Mummies they'll soon be forgotten.

i'll leave you with this photograph... Although this girl ruined a perfect shot of my sculpture it does however help to illustrate the overall scale of the piece. Don't ask me why she was in the nip!

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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.

The upside down - sand sculpture

Hans Christian Andersen - sand sculpture

Berlin sand festival 2005 - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite