Artists create 40-tonne sand sculpture at downtown St. John's gallery

A group of artists and volunteers have been hard at work this week at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John's, shaping a back-breaking pile of sand — 40 tonnes of it, to be specific — into the centrepiece of a new art exhibit.

Artist Josh Vettivelu designed the sculpture to make the viewer feel as if they are inside the hull of a boat.

"It'll feel very heavy," said Vettivelu. "There's going to be five-foot walls of sand that kind of surround you and kind of cascade down. So there's a feeling of entering but also of being barricaded as well."

But the sand sculpture isn't just any boat. Vettivelu said it's inspired by the fishing boat used to rescue Tamil migrants off the shores of Newfoundland in 1986.

The medium of sand is also central to the meaning of the piece, which is meant to portray how people distinguish between "us" and "them," Vettivelu said.

"The physics of a sand sculpture is that it holds itself together through surface tension between two particles of sand and a bridge of water. So those two points of attraction, if you multiply it by a billion, you get a form," said Vettivelu, who is based in Toronto.

"In a similar way, the ways in which we can desire things for ourselves or our families can create a form-like country or nation." 

Vettivelu wanted to use the metaphor of how sand holds itself together to talk about how we "create an us" and how that can be used in different ways.

Artwork echoes Tamil migration to Newfoundland

Creating the piece inside the Eastern Edge Gallery was a journey in itself that took many helping hands, as well as support from organizations like Business and Arts NL, said curator Kailey Bryan.

"We go to art school and we learn a lot of concept and theory, and you do a lot of smaller scale projects," said Bryan.

"But what is really shocking is how much you get into the real world, and you have to know engineering and you need to know math."

• Emotional return to NL for Tamils rescued 30 years ago
• Fishing captain who helped save Tamil refugees passes away

The gallery invited the help of a math professor from Memorial University to assist them in calculating the cubic feet of the installation.

"It's a lot of professions in one."

The exhibition — called Surface Tension, or What Holds An Us Together — opens the night of Friday, April 26 and runs through the month of May.

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