This stunning sand artwork isn't complete until it's been walked all over

In 2018, Business Insider published an article titled "Why the world is running out of sand." It opens with an alarmist tone, boasting the statistic that 67 per cent of southern California's beaches could be gone by the year 2100. The truth, however, is significantly more complex. 

As the world's second-most consumed — but perhaps most underappreciated — resource, sand is responsible for a great deal of quotidian items we take for granted: bricks, glass, concrete, computer chips, credit cards, paints, plastics and even toothpaste. In this light, we might think of it as the foundation of the modern world.  

For Toronto-based artist Shannon Garden-Smith, her interest in sand began after taking a photo of a shoe print in the dried paint of a crosswalk. From there, she began taking similar photographs all over. After realizing that she was effectively looking at images of marks left in sand (both traffic paint and concrete are made using sand), her research shifted to the material as a cornerstone of modern construction and development.

She discovered how the increasing volumes of sand extraction and urbanization projects have spawned black markets through the illegal mining and smuggling of sand from countries in the Global South. Sand from disappearing beaches in Indonesia or Morocco is directly connected to the construction of a new skyscraper elsewhere. 

She then began to think about how Toronto's appetite for development reveals a long history in the global asymmetry of resources, and how this massive urbanization feeds the ongoing project of settler colonialism more broadly. The constant paving over of natural landscapes to build condos, highways and office towers advances a single progress narrative through colonial practices like resource extraction and the dispossession of land.

For the past several years, Garden-Smith has investigated these themes through photography, printmaking, sculpture and installation. More recently, she's garnered attention by creating immersive, large-scale projects using sand, including a standout installation at Nuit Blanche Toronto last month, as well as smaller iterations at Patel Brown's Toronto gallery and Centre Clark in Montreal. In the new year, she'll be showing work that continues her inquiry at Toronto's Onsite Gallery in a joint exhibition alongside Montreal-based photographer Nabil Azab. Through each of these projects, the artist's goal is to make visible some of the invisible forces that shape our relationships to land, architecture and natural resources.

Garden-Smith's work starts from the premise that the vast majority of our built environment begins with sand, namely marine sand, which has been mined from the bottoms of rivers, lakes and oceans. This is the kind of sand created after mountain rocks have been pummeled by wind, rain and waves for tens of thousands of years, producing rough, angular grains that interlock like puzzle pieces. When this sand is mined from the seabed, which consists of just a thin layer over rock, the shore slides downward to fill the new crevice, diminishing the shoreline and increasing the possibility of flooding. As such, the immense demand for construction-grade sand is an ironic contributor to natural disasters that destroy the buildings it helped to create.

Garden-Smith began this body of work by making photographs, imprints in velvet fabric and pewter castings that featured shoe prints as spectral records of human life spent running around in pursuit of productivity. It was her way of "imagining traces of touch that result from movement throughout the city," she explains. 

Her practice then evolved into an immersive form that uses sand directly — mostly play sand — coloured with acrylic paints. The process is arduous. She spends days dying kilograms of sand, breaking apart clumps that form as the paint dries and straining it through a sieve. Once ready, the sand is sifted colour by colour through cut-outs to create patterns resembling marbled paper, which is modelled on the striations of geological matter. The result is a large, intricately patterned sand "carpet," assembled over hundreds of hours. In these installations, the presence of the footprint persists, now coming from the direct contact of visitors who are invited to walk on the sand over the course of an exhibition. 

"I invite viewers into a kind of collective erasure," she says. "Their engagement becomes visible in the living, changing work as an index of movement." 

The carefully constructed designs make reference to the marbled endpapers of British books from the 19th century, whose patterns were taken from earlier Asian and Islamic examples. The Victorian novel is significant, according to law scholar Brenna Bhandar, as it had a key function in the British settler-colonial worldview by encoding the prevailing ideas of individualism and private property. Garden-Smith believes these books, by authors such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and the Brontë sisters, to be cultural forms of the same ideologies that naturalized ideas about property and identity through the British colonial project. In this way, the artist makes a connection between the Victorian novel and the extraction of sand for construction purposes, both as components within the project of modern colonial world-building. 

Spanning roughly 30 by 6.7 metres, the installation for Nuit Blanche Toronto, Snail work (for the lake), was the latest and largest in her series of marbled sand carpets. Since last year, different iterations of the laborious works have also been shown at Patel Brown and Centre Clark. Within these projects, the marbled sand does not constitute the finished product. Rather, Garden-Smith actually considers the human dimension, in which the pattern is "unfixed" through interaction, to be the work itself. 

A related series of "dust drawings" were shown earlier this fall at Centre d'exposition L'Imagier in Montreal (and in the vitrines at York University's Goldfarb Gallery before that). The large, marbled compositions were created using pigmented dust from sand she had collected across the city.

Garden-Smith's larger research creation project for her PhD in visual arts at York University expands on this work. The artist intends to create a massive installation that focuses on the labour of collecting and making use of sand that has gathered along roadsides, in parking lots and within other urban spaces throughout Toronto. 

Garden-Smith refers to sand as a "non-metaphorical infinitude" — it is associated with being abundant and everlasting. While technically a renewable resource, our consumption of sand massively outpaces the rate at which it can be replenished. By using her artwork to shift our attention to the ground and the concealed nature of sand as mass resource consumption, she hopes we can better visualize the shape-shifting relationships between land, extraction and the formation of property. 

Garden-Smith's aim is not only to make sand more visible to us, but also to critically explore alternative futures. Importantly, she asks what it would take to undo the impositions of settler-colonialist value systems. The concept of erasure figures heavily into all aspects of her work with sand: the invisibility of sand as a construction material, and of its extraction; the disappearance of shorelines around the world; the ways in which urbanization erases long-standing ecosystems; and the erasure of her elaborate floor works with the accumulation of footprints. In essence, Garden-Smith poses a challenge to notions of permanence and longevity. 

With her work in mind, it's easier to notice the vestiges of shoe prints in the paint of a newly minted crosswalk or a segment of sidewalk concrete. The footprints act as a type of modern fossil that immortalizes how humans move through the built environment. This process of noticing is essential to remembering, which in turn, attunes us to imagining the world otherwise.