On Sand

public art, 2021

On Sand consists of 500 individual glassine envelopes containing sand grains from the Rhode Island “desert” and a text insert with poetic quotes about sand’s materiality. Each envelope was hand-stamped with a wax seal before being distributed across Providence, RI using multiple channels: tear-off flyers, library books, and direct delivery to randomly selected mailboxes.

This distribution abstractly mimics the process of desertification (spreading sand) while also inviting a momentary encounter with a material that tends to go overlooked but is foundational to… everything basically (architecture! digital technologies! glass! food systems!). The mission is to make a project feel monumental not due to size or spectacle, but rather via the cumulative, incremental power of the granular. To play with sand's unique properties: its scarcity (500 individual envelopes), its value (ornate design with wax seals), and its unpreventable affinity for dispersing and scattering across space (distribution).

“To have at last for herself the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence. That is why she does not take her eyes off those sands, her gaze penetrates one of the phials, she burrows into it, identifies with it, extracts the myriads of pieces of information that are packed into a little pile of sand.”

—Italo Calvino, “Collection of Sand”, 20

Featuring graphic design by Sophia Mick︎︎︎

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