A little girl tried to sneak under the rope. Two small boys stood a moment; then, realizing what it was, went, “Oh, wow!” Other mall-goers stopped to ask questions, including, “Where can you get something to eat?”
“Straight down and to the left there’s a food court,” said artist Ted Siebert, holding a small crafting tool and up to his knuckles in wet, brown Wisconsin riverbed sand.
It was all that grainy stuff-20 tons of it, to be exact-that caught the attention of the kids at Kenosha’s Factory Outlet Centre, one of the discount shopping hubs lining a stretch of Interstate Highway 94 from Gurnee to Wisconsin.
The week before Thanksgiving, Siebert and fellow sand sculptor Charlie Beaulieu, two Guinness Book of World Records holders for sand sculpting, were immersed in sand, creating a Christmas motif for the mall that was to serve, ultimately, as the centerpiece for a holiday food drive.
For seven days they worked, and at the end of the seventh, it stood: the interior of Santa’s house with Santa on a chair before a hearth and Mrs. Claus at work preparing dinner for the elves, nine hungry critters depicted in separate sculptures at each mall entrance.
The project was perfect for Siebert, who had been on the road for months, making his living creating sculptures out of sand. The 37-year-old is a resident of McHenry, where he lives with his wife, Laura, and her daughter, Danielle, 5, and was happy not to have to get on a plane again for a while. Siebert, who had just returned from an assignment in Pittsburgh, often travels from coast to coast for his sand sculpting projects, one reason the Idaho native decided McHenry, with its proximity to a major airport, was a good place to settle a couple of years ago.
Another one was Laura, a graphic designer for a Buffalo Grove company, who lived in the area when the two met at a Baltimore trade show, where he was sculpting replicas of famous buildings.
Part art, part craft, part sport, sand sculpting is one of those unusual, semi-kitsch art evolutions that seem to thrive in the United States (and, due to its nurturing the world championships in British Columbia, in Canada).
One of Siebert’s former associates, after all, is also the national Spam-carving champion.
Siebert laments that the international entries weren’t very good at the recent world championship. (Although he did not compete in ’94, Siebert has placed second, third, fourth and fifth at the championships over the last six years.)
“We’re far ahead of the rest of the world,” says the lifelong artist, who also has done painting and sculpting. Says Beaulieu, a homebuilder with an architectural background: “No, the guy from India had an interesting piece. Then there was that guy from France.”
They nod to one another. “He was an art teacher who had never done sand sculpting,” says Siebert. “He did this thing where he put sticks in the ground and swirled the sand around and called it `Energy’ or something.”
That, friends, is not sand sculpting. Sand sculpting is castles miles wide and many feet high, elaborate labyrinths complete with gargoyles and munchkins and architectural artifice.
It is vivid characters with memorable expressions, often cartoon characters brought to a stone-like life. Those are the predominant motifs of contemporary sand sculpting as it stands-a relatively new art at which about 30 people are making a living in the U.S. and Canada today, mostly through mall and trade-show projects.
The Kenosha mall work was a typical adventure for Siebert and Beaulieu, who lives near Seattle. It unfolded in large part before an audience.
Hundreds of curious, noisy, often complimentary passersby stopped to glimpse a work in progress. But their main interest was in finding the next good bargain.
It was frequently very stressful, Siebert says, working in such an atmosphere while trying to craft wrinkles into a face and other such fine details.
There was much the public didn’t see, too. Such as the sculptors and several hired laborers trucking in the tonnage and shoveling it into place. Such as the hearth collapsing on Beaulieu the first day, ruining hours of work. Such as the sand wizards sculpting some whimsical and humorous features into their subjects after hours.
“Sometimes I’ll say, `It’d be fun to put a woman’s legs on this frog,’ then the next day, I have to remember what I did and get rid of it before anyone comes in,” says Siebert, whose work includes many mall projects. “For this one, we were talking about an elf in chains with a mohawk. But I don’t think they’d want that.”
No, Siebert and Beaulieu were hired partly for entertainment value and partly to publicize the food drive. Also, says center marketing director Terryl Troyer, “because we’re not your typical mall, we can’t put up typical Christmas decorations.” Translation: no soaring atrium.
Besides, says Troyer, “I’d done sand sculpting in another mall and it’s the uniqueness-people really enjoy watching how fast it can be done.”
Yet there is something quite ethereal about sand sculpture-the knowledge that it is fleeting, that like the next wave destroying the sand castle, it can be gone in an instant. Such an event actually helped Beaulieu win the world championship once.
“I happened to be near when a storm blew in,” says Beaulieu of the British Columbia competition which, like most contests, takes place entirely on the beach.
“I was just lucky I got most of mine covered. A lot of others were destroyed.”
“It’s a labor of love, really,” says Siebert. “I think people know that, and they’re curious to see it go up because they know it’s only temporary.”
The Kenosha pieces will come down the day after Christmas, knocked back to their original state and carted away, a few grains left behind for the mop and dumpster.
Siebert and Beaulieu, partners on and off for six years, will have moved on to another job. What will have been amazing is how lifelike the little creatures will have seemed.
Beaulieu brings a construction and architectural background to projects necessary when building structures 21 feet high (the height the pair built a castle last year for a world record) or 6.5 miles long (which they built in 1990 for another world record).
Siebert is from a family of artists: His father, who once took him to a sand sculpting contest, did metal sculpture; one brother is a painter and a sister a paper sculptor. Sand sculpting’s hub is in the Pacific Northwest, and Siebert fell in after receiving a degree in creative writing from the University of Washington.
That he can make a living at it-sand sculptors are cagey about their incomes, but Siebert finally agrees to the figure of $30 an hour-amazes him.
What the public finds most unbelievable, says Siebert, is that sand sculptors work strictly with a medium of sand and water. Only careful construction and molding hold it all together.
A little glue in the mix might have prevented the Kenosha hearth from collapsing last month-“We’d noticed a crack in the chimney, it was a structural flaw,” says Siebert-but that isn’t done. That, of course, is part of sand sculpting’s beauty.
The stuff hardens like rock, however. In fact, a man testing the wall of a castle at a Minnesota mall dislocated his shoulder heaving himself into its side.
The worst part of the work is bringing the loose sand into a site-they’ve found live scorpions, dead frogs and many cigarette butts in their hauls. The best part? Detailing a finishing touch and standing back to admire the work.
They’re often asked about personal commissions. Beaulieu fondly remembers a request from a youngster at a mall to come over to his house to make a sandcastle. But there are limitations.
“People have no idea how much it would weigh. It would crash right through the floor,” says Siebert. A five-gallon bucket of sand weighs 20 pounds.
Not that they haven’t taken personal jobs. Siebert’s most memorable was to fashion a “Will you marry me?” piece, with cupids and arrows, on a beach near Seattle. It was addressed with the name of the woman, who was brought by the beach that day.
“Usually at night the kids are waiting to come out of the woodwork and knock stuff down,” says Siebert. “But for some reason, this one stood the next day.”
That’s when another woman with the same name chanced by the sculpture and thought one of her two boyfriends had sent the proposal to her. Summoning a local newspaper, she posed by the piece with her answer. Then, says Siebert, one of the boyfriends claimed he’d built the sculpture for her. “I called the newspaper and set them straight,” he says.
Of the original couple, Siebert says, “Oh, I think she dumped him.”
Maybe there’s a message in that. As Siebert says, sand sculptures aren’t meant to last, to be captured for immortality. “As they say, art is never finished,” he says, “only abandoned.”
And left to the elements of water, air and the teeth of a Bobcat end loader. Only to rise again, at a mall near you.
