Water's Surface
As the tide turned for the second time on 23rd June I was loading up a small cart with what seemed like several tons of equipment: Several specially made wooden frames, plywood boards, cameras, tripods, towels, sponges, buckets, endless plastic bags, a full 20kg bag of casting plaster, and around 10 litres of fresh water. The task ahead seemed pretty herculean, and I’d been up since 4am.
By the time I had dragged that cart from the car park at Wells-next-the-sea, along through the pine forest, up the steep boardwalk over the dunes, and down onto the soft, soft sand by the beach huts, I was regretting the whole idea.
My plan was to take plaster casts from the beach surface at low tide to capture those wonderfully sculpted ripples cut by the surge of receding water. Much of Norfolk’s coastline has been heavily altered over the years: Often this has been in response natural coastal erosion, and in more recent years it has been to accommodate the maintenance and construction vessels of the rapidly expanding wind-farm industry. Inevitably, dredging deeper channels for larger shipping causes further knock-on changes to the movements of sand and silt around the coast. Wells-next-the-sea has seen it’s fair share of these changes over my lifetime alone.
Plaster-of-Paris captures extremely fine detail, so it seemed ironically fitting to take such a perfect, static, and permanent copy of something so transient, fragile, and shifting.
I had done a little theoretical research about how saltwater might alter the curing of Plaster, and it seemed as though it would catalyse (speed) the reaction. Not having tested exactly how much more quickly the plaster would cure, and not wanting to drag the equipment out to the low tide line in vain, I had brought bottles of fresh water.
I had chosen Wells because of the vast sand flats which are exposed at low tide, and because plaster is a liquid before it cures. - Many other beaches have a steeper beach gradient and it would be near impossible to take a good cast of the size I wanted without the resultant slab of plaster being super thick at one end and wafer thin at the other. - The downside of this is that those beautiful textures in the sand were now over a kilometer away through soft deep sand.
looking back to the pine forest at Wells-next-the-sea
The wooden frames I have made to contain each cast are as large as the biggest kiln i have access to. They are proportioned in keeping with the Golden Section, that most sacred of ratios which Mother Nature herself favours. When the wooden frame sits on the sand, it rests on the uppermost peaks of the ripple texture, allowing air (and plaster therefore) to pass through the lower parts of the texture. To overcome this problem, and to allow the plaster slab to be released from the mould, I had carefully cut long strips of thin plastic which I would push down into the damp sand.
I had abandoned the bottled water by the beach-huts, fearing that the weight might finish me off, and deciding to risk using seawater to mix the plaster; and I was glad I did. It turns out that seawater (with a salinity of approximately 3.5%) doesn’t just catalyse the reaction, but also lends the plaster a creamy smooth texture unlike anything I have previously cast with. It was so silky, in fact, that I was able to smooth the back surface with a plastic spatula, to an almost glass-like finish as it was curing. This, if nothing else, seemed sufficiently revelatory, but the casts themselves were the icing on the cake!
Once I got these beauties back to the studio I was able to further clean them, removing the stones and sand, and revealing yet more exquisite detail. The scrap of green seaweed bears a striking similarity to a crumpled plastic bag and this serendipitous ambiguity helps highlight that most ubiquitous of global problems; ocean plastic pollution.
