Snail-work (for the lake)
Unfixed, pigmented sand, 98’ x 22’
Part of “Cat’s Cradle” Curated by Danica Pinteric
Nuit Blanche, Tkaronto/Toronto
October 2024
Photos: Polina Teif, Vlad Lunin
Video: Vlad Lunin
This project is part of Cat’s Cradle curated by Danica Pinteric for Nuit Blanche 2024. The exhibition uncovers unexpected material networks that connect us. Artists explore themes of collectivity, flux, and interdependence along Toronto’s changing waterfront.
Made of unfixed, vibrantly dyed sand, Snail-work (for the lake) is a floor installation that recreates historical marbling patterns at an immersive scale. Audiences are invited to move through the work as a snail might, gently interacting with the pattern – disrupting, unmaking and remaking it in the process. This project emerges from the artist’s research on sand, which links sand extraction with settler colonial systems of knowing and development. By volume, sand is the second‐most consumed material in the world, and as the primary ingredient in concrete and glass, it forms the very world around us. Astoundingly, this material that is associated with infinitude is beginning to run out. The ways that sand is conceived of, extracted, valued and used, underscore the unsustainable practices that underpin the contemporary world. Dedicated to Lake Ontario’s waterfront, Snail-work (for the lake) recreates mesmerizing marbling patterns sourced from Victorian books, patterns which themselves have their origins in non-Western cultures and contend with their own colonial histories of erasure. As people move through the sand, they create new, unanticipated patterns while also undoing the original pattern. This process of collective remaking occurs through intimate, embodied contact surfacing questions of sustainability, truth and care.