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fractal landscapes | hills by graham hooper

tradition play typology ephemerality instability

Graham Hooper

I n 1967 Jimi Hendrix recorded ‘Castles Made of Sand’ for his Axis: Bold as Love album. Lyrically it is quite unusual in its autobiographical reference to the transience of life and ephemeral nature of existence – family, love, loyalty, and to Hendrix’s life in particular – moving home in his youth, maternal attachment issues. Perhaps in America the idea of castles made of sand is an altogether alien idea: beaches are for surfing maybe? Whilst Big Sur has the sand it lacks the medieval architecture. Likewise whilst Bavaria might have better castles, other locations boast superior beaches. Small plastic primary-coloured British buckets, are used as moulds for making sand forms in the shape of castles, those fine stately homes of the past that dot the English landscape –some of which, often under National Trust management, are open for the public to marvel at their splendour; other castles, at the mercy of the elements and left to fall into disrepair as a result of the prohibitive costs involved in their upkeep, become mysterious, mythical ruins. For the British, on our sandy beaches, on a sunny, summer’s day, filling a bucket with sand, upending it and tapping its bottom with (matching coloured) spade to release the sheath of plastic, will reveal a cast. Then, traditionally, the sandcastles are decorated with paper flags, moats and seaweed.

In the mid-1990s I took a photograph whilst on a beach at Marazion in Cornwall, looking out at St. Michael’s Mount. The vantage point allowed for a view of the mount in the background as well as a sandcastle ‘replica’ in the foreground. I say replica – but I have emphasised the visual rhyming myself, in my choice of framing. If the child (or adult) making the sand structure was aiming to build a facsimile of the mount behind, then it is crude and inaccurate. But it can hardly of escaped their notice that the sandcastle is sited on a beach in front of a mount that looks a little like a sandcastle. Around the same time I had seen a collection of photographs by the British photographer and scientist, Bill Hurst, at the Untitled Gallery in Sheffield who had drawn visual comparisons between the self-replication of patterns in scale in various constructed and ‘natural environments. Clearly it had resonated. This mount has always been paired (and formally since the eleventh century) with Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. It has the same tidal island characteristics and the same conical shape. In this sense the sandcastle I saw that day and photographed, reflects this pairing. They are sisters, separated in space and size, but connected in spirit, material and form.

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