Snail work, or give the colours what turns you please (dans les cérémonies)
Unfixed, pigmented sand, 23’ 5.5” x 14’ 1.25”
April 12-May 11, 2024
Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK, Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal
Photos: Paul Litherland, Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK
When untouched, Shannon Garden-Smith’s Snail work, or give the colours what turns you please (dans les cérémonies) extends in mesmerising unbroken perfection across the floor. From afar, the installation may be mistaken for a textile in rich colours: it is consuming in its weighty reds, sky-dust blues, jewel-like greens and yellows. Approach and find that Snail work is made of sand, those little grains of ground rock, worn littler by oceans, time, the moon. The sand has been dyed and intricately laid in the exact pattern of a marbled endpaper found in a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century book sourced from McGill’s Rare Books Library, here in this land we call Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.
An analogue process of suspending and “combing” pigments over a thickened water bath, marbling techniques were secrets guarded by practitioners for centuries. Suggesting a relationship with the veining in stone, the floating patterns are recorded on a paper sheet that lightly touches and absorbs the coloured surface. Here, and in recent projects, Garden-Smith works with the tightly orchestrated patterns that proliferated as the endpapers of Victorian-era books.
The ornateness of the marbled sand floor in Snail work is a sensitizer, a state-altering experience that alerts us to the sacredness of things usually ignored. Sand, for instance, that thing that is sometimes used as a metaphor for the infinite, is in fact a precious and non-renewable resource that is rapidly depleting as we use it to build all of our structures, increasingly, out of concrete and glass.
Is there any other process so everlasting and painstaking as a wave’s repeated beat against the shore, resulting in the making of sand? Just as sand is the indexical mark of the work of water, Garden-Smith’s Snail-work is the notation of an embodied choreography that she performs with the formidable force of her energy over a very long period of time. Snail work is, perhaps, the movement that she cannot not do. It is the thing generated, through steadfast effort, by her relationship with the world.
Do we ask the ocean if it is tired? Could we call water’s work creative? These will not seem the wrong questions to ask after an encounter with Garden-Smith’s Snail work. Of course, the ocean is tireder and more creative than anything, and it is a vessel for a force somehow even larger than itself, of gravity: it is a reminder that scale goes infinitely high and infinitely low in either direction. The question we may now want to ask of gravity is, what are you grieving? To which the answer is, of course, all things.
Garden-Smith shows us that we are also, perhaps,as creative and as tired as an ocean, and as grief-stricken as that ocean is laden down with weight. Moving through Snail work sensitizes the mover to the labour and socio-environmental crises we may usually be pushed to ignore. If our hearts break and shudder to a stop when we blur, with our bodies, the perfection of the pattern beneath us, our newly exposed nerves must now feel the full extent of what they had previously been hidden from, in the dailiness of their beating.
—Bronwyn Garden-Smith