Monday 1 August 2011

Writing in the Sand - Dianne Hofmeyr

Once as I was strolling through the gardens of the People’s Culture Park just outside the Forbidden City in Beijing, I was stopped in my tracks by a man writing on the pathway. He used large sweeping movements across the stone with a brush dipped in nothing more than water. As fast as he wrote so the characters evaporated and disappeared like an invisible memory of the city. The temporality of the water writing took my breath away… it seemed as futile and at the same time as purposeful as shouting words on the wind.

There’s a similar concept in the work of Andrew van der Merwe who catches ephemeral moments, not in water but in wet sand. He uses the wide open vistas of the sea – sand, sky and rocks – to inform his work. The script appears totally at one with the landscape. The marks are as mysterious as runic or cuneiform inscriptions and seem to echo and almost emphasize the ripples left by waves and like mirror mosaics they catch glimpses of the sky in the water that collects in the hollows and grooves. The patterns and marks are precise. He has devised special tools to make them and he leaves no trace of footprints or upturned sand.

The work focuses on the fleeting moment as we wait for the wind to dry and blur the script, or waves to come and wash it away. Remember doing this with sandcastles? Rushing down to the beach the next day to see what had happened? It’s an ever-changing process –in his case, a tactile merging of words with the physical. To me the marks themselves together with the idea of being transitory – that sense of temporariness and ephemerality – seem to focus and accentuate glimpses of atmospheres, memories, sounds and movements that go unnoticed and sometimes even unseen.

So since it’s August and some of us are at our desks and not at the sea… here we are then…

Dianne Hofmeyr: www.diannehofmeyr.com

For a review of the 2011 Kate Greenaway:

http://awfullybigreviews.blogspot.com/2011/07/grahame-baker-smiths-farther-flies-off.html

For those interested in historical writing: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

For more on Andrew van der Merwe: http://www.behance.net/beachscriber

15 comments:

Joan Lennon said...

Thank you for such amazing images!

Sue Purkiss said...

Just beautiful!

Stroppy Author said...

Wow! Beautiful!

adele said...

These photos have made my day!
Thanks, Dianne

Vivien said...

These images are really beautiful and your words take me back to a time, probably around twenty year ago now, when there was a Tibetan exhibition at the British Museum. Part of it involved a group of Tibetan monks creating a huge picture from coloured sand. Each colour was tapped out almost grain by grain from metal horns and the rhythm of that tapping was itself like a mantra. When they had finished, they took the picture and tipped it into the Thames so that the river could take it away and back into the world again. That idea has stayed with me ever since.

Rosalind Adam said...

Beautiful sand pictures but how does he do it without even leaving a footprint? And as for the water writing, how strange that we all have such different perspectives on art.

Beachscriber said...

Thanks for the compliments!

Yes, its temporal quality is half the attraction for me too. I so often get people asking me while I'm working if I know that the tide is coming in. They just don't "get it". Explaining the asemic nature of some of my work can also be a challenge.

Footprints? It's so basic that it would spoil it for you if I gave you a straight answer. My stock answer is that I levitate but that that is the easy part. Getting the calligraphy right remains the real challenge. If you look closely at a higher resolution image you will see evidence of disturbance, that is unless the wind has had a chance to work on it.

&rew

Andrew van der Merwe,
Calligrapher
100 Stella Road, Plumstead, 7800,
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel: +27 (0)21 761 4400
Cell: +27 (0)83 652 1569
Fax: +27 (0)86 503 9731
Skype: writtenword1
www.writtenword.co.za
www.beachscriber.artfire.com
www.behance.net/beachscriber/frame
www.facebook.com/beachscriber

Lynda Waterhouse said...

Andrew you work is breathtakingly beautiful and mysterious. Since creating my Sand Dancers stories I have come to love sand dunes and I know the sand sprites approve of you as opposed to a certain other human who is currently building a golf course and hotel complex on the dunes. As it says in the Sands of Time 'Draw a line in the sand and then go out and have fun.'(www.thesanddancers.com)

Dianne Hofmeyr said...

Levitating... sounds like a good option or fairy wings??? These are children's authors after all! I forgot to mention that in another life Andrew did the calligraphy on the cover of one of my picture books.
Vivien your description of the Tibetan monks tapping the sand horns to create something and then tossing it back 'into the world again'is amazingly evocative... I love what you said on your profile - tracking down the echoes of the past.

Beachscriber said...

Lynda, don't get me started about developers and their golf estates. I have been known to carve ancient curses in their sand pits. If I could command the tide in a selective way ...

Beachscriber said...

Dianne, I have to tell you that one of my favourite things when working on the beach is the interaction O get with kids. And I often let them play with some of my instruments. Dogs are another story.

Susan Price said...

I didn't expect to like this so much, but the photos and art are breathtakingly beautiful. Thank you Di and Andrew.
Australian Aborigines, too, have a tradition of creating beautiful, complex sand paintings which disappear in a short time. It's a meditation, a religious act, rather than the creation of a possession.

Beachscriber said...

Sometimes it is a kind of meditation for me - especially when I carve someone's name. I think about that person. If it is someone who has died, it is a way of coming to terms with the loss. My asemic pieces are less profound. I do them to relax, to just play with the forms. The logic required to invent/contrive an imaginary writing system is like a game. It can also be like music: I ply with a basic form the way a musician might play with a theme, inverting it, breaking and rejoining it, etc.

Paeony Lewis said...

Glorious, evocative images, and the written insight and artist comments add even more. I must admit the idea of inscribing ancient curses appeals (especially if it involves a certain man with dubious hair).

Dianne Hofmeyr said...

love that one Paeony!