Sand castles V castles on the sand.

A sand castle is a celebration of the material, construction and concept act as one, fragility becomes mailability, impermanence adds exhilaration to the construction and pushes a form that must at least be aware of the tides imposed function.

A castle on the sand is a clash of materials, the construction at odds with the concept, fragility and impermanence don’t show a second face here. The grandiosity and gross size of the walls will fall before shifting footing and the tides assault.

So what’s does this metaphor stretched over an idiom have to do with you? Where’s the art?

My thinking, as best as I can piece it out, is that there are great technical artists, capable of raising bastions, spires, curtain walls and turrets. Yet they build these monuments atop shifting sand which will inevitably undermine the works, through loss of ephemeral meaning, eroded ideas, or simply a lack of integrity to begin with.

You risk adding too much to too little in a way that contradicts the truth in both. Be weary of that, lest you end up creating an anti police brutality message on the back of a Pepsi advert, a much called for castle placed upon the stupidest of sands.

This is not to say one can’t celebrate the ephemeral, the impermanence, but in my mind it is better done so through working with that material, as opposed to trying to place a burden on it which it can’t support.

Of course there is still beauty in the wreck and ruin left behind after a castle falls, the rubble reclaimed can harbour its own meaning. But we don’t usually set out to build ruins, and they aren’t celebrated whilst they fall.

Sand castles however, they know what they’re about, they celebrate what they are. I’d rather build something fit for its purpose, even if that purpose only lasts a moment.

(Banksy - sandcastles on the beach in Hastings)