Welcome to the addictive and high-stakes world of competitive sand sculpting
As soon as I touched the sand and started carving it, I was just like, 'This is what I want to do.'
There's no one way to become a professional sand sculptor, according to award-winning Burlington, Ont.-based sculptor Karen Fralich.
Fralich is a judge on the upcoming sand-sculpting competition show Race Against the Tide. The show will see teams of sculptors from around the world build enormous, breathtaking works of art in just six hours — the amount of time it takes for the tide in the Bay of Fundy to go out and come back. She's been sand sculpting competitively since the mid-'90s, and doing it full-time since 2001. She says she got into it almost by accident.
"I was working at a pottery studio," she says. "The lady who owned the pottery studio started dating a guy who was a sand sculptor, which we'd never heard of before. He saw what I was doing at the pottery studio and he asked me if I'd like to try sand sculpture. He needed help on a local job. As soon as I touched the sand and started carving it, I was just like, 'This is what I want to do. This is it.'"
As soon as I touched the sand and started carving it, I was just like, this is what I want to do. This is it.- Karen Fralich
Fralich says that there's much more to sand sculpting than meets the eye. For one thing, not all sand is created equal.
"You want sand with particulate in it," she says. "The best is usually river sand or brick sand, something that you would use for laying a foundation. Where the show is taking place [in New Brunswick], there is a naturally occurring silt in the sand coming out of New River."
She also says that sand sculpture is far more durable than people imagine.
"They don't just crumble and fall apart when it gets rained on or it's windy," she says. "In order to do a sand sculpture [the sand] can't be just a soft, fluffy, dry pile. It's got to be a wet, solid brick that you carve into, kind of like soft sandstone. They're incredibly durable; they can last weeks and months."
Fralich says that sand sculpting has changed tremendously over her two-and-a-half-decade career. She says that "when you compare stuff from 20 years ago, it looks so amateur compared to what people do today."
Part of the reason for the change in quality, according to Fralich, is that more people, from more places, with a greater variety of skill sets, have started sculpting.
"When I started, it was mostly sculptors from North America and [Western] Europe," she says. "And the styles tended to be either sort of an abstract, European-feel sculpture, or North Americans carving cartoony Disney-esque characters with castles. And it was pretty rough… Then slowly, a lot of Eastern Europeans, Russians, Asians, South Americans and a few Africans started coming into this, and they all brought their own styles with them. The Russians are just masters of human anatomy. They go to school from when they're eight years old to study art for 20 years and they're just brilliant at it. All of these styles combined and made everyone up their game."
Fralich says she was impressed with the skills of all the competitors on Race Against the Tide. To do complex, creative work while trying to race a clock, particularly one enforced by the tides of the Bay of Fundy, was a remarkable feat.
"The format of this show is so tough," she says. "It is so challenging to do that much in that little time. So the fact that everybody was up to the game, up to the challenge, was amazing and inspiring right off the bat. And then when they were coming up with these crazy ideas and pulling them off, it was truly inspiring."
Karen Fralich's Sand Slam
The Race Against the Tide judge shares with us her favourite sand sculpting events from around the globe:
Tottori Sand Museum, Tottori, Japan
"There is a custom-made, state-of-the-art museum of sand sculpture in Tottori, on the west coast of Japan. It houses an incredible display of annually-changing sand sculptures. I've been lucky enough to be invited to sculpt some of these sculptures over the years."
Belen de Arena, Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, Spain
"For 20 years, I've been invited to help sculpt the Sand Nativity on Las Canteras Beach in the Canary Islands. It's always a new twist on the Christmas story."
The Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"For 16 years — it would have been 18 years this year, if not for COVID — I've been sculpting a 100-tonne centrepiece for the CNE. For 10 of those years, we ran an international masters-level sand sculpting contest as well."
Hampton Beach Sand Sculpture Classic, Hampton Beach, N.H., U.S.A.
"Another incredible international masters sand sculpture competition that has been running for 21 years. The best sand in the world is trucked in from a quarry to the beach every year."
Neptune Festival, Virginia Beach, Va., U.S.A.
"I think this contest is 45 years old!? It has changed over the years from a family amateur event to a world-class gallery showing the best in the world."
Race Against the Tide premieres on Thursday, September 9 at 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. (8:30 and 9 NT) on CBC and CBC GEM with two back-to-back episodes airing each week.