In Truro, MA, for a vacation in 2005, I discovered a vein of beautiful light grey mud in the dunes along Long Nook Beach. Mixing this mud with sand and ocean water, I created my own "beach clay". Each day that summer, during the nine hours I spent on the beach, I mixed fresh clay, which I used to make mud sculptures. Perhaps due to this materials' newness, I developed new shapes and forms -- spikes and horns on balls, and piled up ball after ball to craft fanciful mud towers. I made over 70 of these sculptures, and installed them in groups mounted on flat beach stones. As the days accumulated, so did the forms, and by the end of the summer I had created an entire city of beach clay monuments.
I arrived each morning excited to see what had happened to my "city." Perhaps seagulls had circled the installation and left foot prints around them, or the night rain had pot-marked their surfaces. Once some were even stolen by other bathers only to be rediscovered abandoned down the beach -- the thieves must have been displeased with their fragility. Over the summer fellow beach goers stopped by and commented on them, remarking on how the installation grew and changed. A very heavy storm one day left its mark on the pieces weathering them beyond recognition, creating an instant ruin, which spurred me to work against time and the elements to rebuild my city.
By the time I left the beach at the end of August, many of these works had already begun to crumble. On my drive back to Philadelphia, I thought about these objects returning into the wind and the waves. In the Clay Studio in September, my new work grew out of these salty, free and fleeting experiments, both in the individual forms, and the way I began to think about groupings.
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