The Land Bridge Project (Shifting Sands)

In its first incarnation, The Land Bridge Project took the form of a railed off excavation pit at the bottom of which was a square of wave washed sand in which paths of human footprints were preserved. The work, developed for a sculpture festival in Sweden, evoked the prehistoric human footprints found in exposed sand banks  in several places around the UK  and proposed a notional causeway joining our country to the mainland, as indeed it was prior to the last Ice Age.

The Land Bridge Project was born out of the unpleasant nationalism that surrounded the events of 2016 and seeks to remind us (and re-assure our fellow Europeans) that whilst some may wish to separate our country we are still bound by our history, our heritage and our humanity.

The Shifting Sands format of The Land Bridge Project has been developed for the upcoming Biennale in Ireland, which is carrying the title “The Current State”. The sand has been solidified and brought out of the excavation (which limited the size and location of the work).The artwork takes the form of a pavement where the petrified nature of the sand emphasises the age of the footprints. The sand bank causeway is however criss-crossed by fissures breaking it into slabs which seem to move up and down in the nature of pack-ice.