Over Easter weekend, many Paekākāriki beach walkers were struck by the sight of the beautiful shell covered Mermaid sand sculpture at the north end of the beach near Wainui stream.
Its photograph is the current header of the Paekākāriki Mermaids’ Messenger page. (I’m one of those madcaps (and we all wear thermal caps) who swim each morning throughout the year, come rain or shine).
Over the next few days, a boat, a turtle, a whale, and a dragon, although not necessarily in that order, emerged out of nothing, well actually out of sand. For all I know, there may have been some other creations. One day I spotted the architects of these short-lived structures: a young family from Featherston. Despite their hometown’s name, there wasn’t a feathered critter among their inventions. Admiring their resourceful spirit and sandy art, I got chatting to them about their holiday of several days at the Paekākāriki Holiday Park. They had spent a fair bit of happy time on the beach, and not just making things out of sand. In this time of constant striving for ever more exotic and unusual travel experiences, this family was living, breathing proof that a local holiday can be a good one!
We also chatted about the changing nature of Featherston, its variety of shops, its thriving weekend market, its wonderfully refurbished Royal Hotel, and its annual Booktown festival (9 to 11 May 2025). They were patriotic about their town and its literary festival, touted last year by Reading Room’s literary editor, Steve Braunias, as one of the best, and certainly the friendliest, in the country. https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/05/27/featherston-better-than-auckland/ I told them how I hadn’t managed to get to it, but had replayed some interesting interviews that were recorded at last year’s event.
There is something special about sand art. It’s easy to dismiss it as not proper Art, partly because of its transitory, ephemeral nature. Sand creations can take hours, even days sometimes, of painstaking effort to build, only to get washed away by the tide, or by a rogue wave that suddenly decides to lizard tongue further up the beach or, if not that, then urinated on by a leg cocking dog, or stomped on by a child with a bad dose of schadenfreude or just for the sheer hell of it. There is something oddly satisfying about jumping on a sand castle and smashing it to smithereens, although if you’re over 18 years, the optics of vandalising a sand castle aren’t pretty, suggesting some sort of sociopathy; even more so if you’re unfortunate enough to register among the elderly. It’s definitely a practice to do when no one else is about.
But isn’t it precisely this transitoriness that is a large part of sand art’s charm? Double Cliche Alert, spending time on building sand structures is said to be ‘a metaphor for the futility of existence’ – an illustration of how little control we have over events, based on the idea that life itself is not that different. Spend ages working at a job or creating a career, a family, a house or whatever, then whoosh, one day, sooner or later, it’s all gone, swept away by ‘the tide of life’.
There is a science to sand creations. Every beach has its particular conditions of sand, how wet or dry it is, the changing tides that affect the longevity of the creation, the weather, the wind, and rain. Sand, a singular sounding substance, is made up of billions of minute particles. As Wikipedia or its increasingly pushy AI supplanter, will tell you sandcastle building is based on surface tension, with water bridging the sand grains, holding them together. We all know from experience that when sand is too wet, it collapses, while if too dry it crumbles. Even the shape of the grain apparently makes a difference: angular sand grains make for a more stable structure because they interlock better. Who would have known? Most of us can remember being on a beach where the sand just doesn’t stick enough or is too frustratingly slushy to create anything with.
Why does an unattended sand creation somehow look bereft and lonely? Once the obvious site of industry and artistry, it now looks desolate and abandoned without those people who were busily engaged in adding shells, moats, sticks, or whatever else came to hand. Who are these creators? We want to know.
Hats off to that visiting Featherston family. They are true artists!
