Artist given £30k of your cash to build sandcastles!
FOR generations children have enjoyed building sandcastles at the beach – but now the popular holiday pastime is set to become ‘art’.
Visual artist Katie Paterson has been awarded £30,000 of public cash to hand out plastic buckets to holidaymakers.
The Glasgow-born artist, who once set up a telephone line to an Icelandic glacier, wants people to decorate Scottish beaches with sandcastles in the shape of famous mountains.
She is timing her latest exhibition, Sand Pail Mountains, to coincide with the summer solstice and hopes it will ‘create a live topographical map connecting Earth’s oldest rocks with the UK’s geological landscape’.
Creative Scotland, which is funding the project, described it as an ‘ambitious and enjoyable participatory artwork’. But last night critics said the quango should not be paying out for ‘dubious art projects’ at a time when vital services are stretched.
The £30,000 will help fund ‘unique’ events on Mull, Skye, Lewis, North Uist, Orkney, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. They will run for 12 hours, from low to high tide, with a rota of community groups ‘simultaneously playing out the world’s natural geography during this timeframe’.
Miss Paterson, 35, who now lives in Berlin, hopes the foot-high scale models of the world’s highest peaks will turn the beaches ‘into thousands of mountains of sand’.
A Creative Scotland spokesman said: ‘Sand Pail Mountains will provide an enjoyable opportunity for communities across Scotland to reflect on the geography and geology of our coastlines.
‘Katie Paterson is an internationally recognised artist who has a very strong track record of excellence and experimentation in her work.’
Creative Scotland’s announcement of Big Lottery Open Project Funding stated: ‘It involves production of bespoke Sand Pail sets moulded on world mountains which will travel to each cultural venue. The venue will stage a geographically unique Sand Pail Mountain event on its local beach, co-ordinating a group of participants (young people, schoolchildren, families) to take part.’
Miss Paterson, who attended Edinburgh College of Art and has a London studio, has been tipped to win the Turner Prize.
Her previous work includes creating a map of 27,000 known dead stars, couriering a fragment of the Moon around the Earth anti-clockwise for a year, and burying a tiny grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.
Contacted by The Scottish Mail on Sunday last week, she said: ‘The application is being processed and until we find out the results, we won’t be releasing any more details.’
TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive John O’Connell said: ‘We are hearing about severe funding shortages in healthcare and at schools, yet we continue to fund expensive and dubious art projects.’
‘Expensive and dubious art projects’