The black death - sand sculpture

Even with all the crap going on in the world we are still pretty lucky to be living in a time when the pandemics that once ravaged the world are only a rare accuracy and very quickly brought under control with modern medicine. The last big one, Ebola killed within the tens of thousands but the black death which raged through Europe in the 12th century killed between 75 and 200 million people. Reducing the population between 30 to 60%.
Most of us now will hopefully never experience these Medieval plagues, most of the dangers we now face are of mans own making. That said I did nearly die from Scarlet Fever, but that's another story.

I was back in Zeebrugge, Belgium for another sand sculpture festival organised by the Dutch company Inaxi. With a Theme of ' European History' it was a hodge podge of different scenes depicting different architecture and historic events. In those days the overall design left alot to be desired with no interesting flow through the montage of scenes.

Niall Magee, Fergus Mulvany and I were asked to tackle this area illustrating the black death. It had a few blocks of sand and a large wall of soft uncompacted sand as a backdrop.

Bring out your dead

Niall and I started working on the biggest block and while I carved a big barrow full of dead bodies Niall made the plague doctor pushing it along.
Another little history lesson for you...The clothes that the doctors wore were waxed fabric and a mask like the beak of a bird with two glass eye covers. Inside the beak was placed herbs, straw and spices with the idea that keeping away the stench of rotting flesh would be the best way to make a hazmat suit. It wasn't.

I had lots of fun making the dead bodies as they played their macabre game of twister. legs and arms going all directions and a few heads here and there to give the sides focal points all the while making sure there were no naught bits on show. Kids could be watching and although apparently it's ok to show grotesque death, life creating sex organs was a no no.

Add the ad

As a commercially sponsored event the sponsors wanted to have their own logos and mascots carved around the place. The so called artistic director asked us to put in some kind of cartoony mascot from a product and even though we protested, thinking it would be completely out of context it was insisted upon that he had to appear somewhere in our scene.

So, I stuck his head in among all the dead bodies as a 'Put that in your pipe and smoke it' gesture.

Fergus did a nice job of the inside of the hospital building which we were asked to do as a backdrop. We felt it needed to show inside the building somehow or else people wouldn't get that it was a place hoping to save the dying.

Straight lines and windows

Once I finished doing the mascot gang bang I moved on to helping Fergus finish the building, making the exterior which was based on a still standing building from the time.
God I hate making sand buildings, especially in soft sand where you have to lean the walls so as to give them support. I did try to do some perspective thingy but wasn't too happy with how it turned out.

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

Lough Derg monster - sand sculpture

Asterix sand sculpture

Acorns - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon.

@ammonite