In The Niigata Land and Water Festival, 2009 I presented the work Shinohara’s House. This house had been moved to the village of Gokahama when the village in which it was situated, Kakuminhama, sank beneath the encroaching ocean. Kakuminaha was famous for singing sand, My bronze and glass columns sang when a mixture of glass beads and sand were poured through them. This work remained in Japan but I realised that a version of this musical piece would transfer to another context.
I now live on the Cox’s River and the riverbank provides an ever-changing environment, small beaches form and reform, the roots of the trees are rounded and curved by the flow of the river, occasionally a tree falls and this creates new sand banks. Here nothing is permanent and the sound of the water provides an ongoing flowing rhythm of continues movement. My intention is to create an installation that reverberates with this sense of an organic process of change, decay and regrowth.
