Walking past our local beach yesterday Rikka and I are amazed to see it has been turned into a stone sculpture display. Everywhere we look rocks are balanced on top of rocks in decreasing size to form sculptural towers. This must have started with the artistic impulse of one person which then inspired someone else; soon the thought had been passed on at least thirty times and created this fantastic rock garden.

What I like about it is that, through the choice of stone colour, the size of stone and where it's built, every tower is different; each one in some way expresses the individuality of the builder. My favourite tower is built in such a way that it seems to be defying gravity; though there must be a line through it down to the centre of the earth which keeps the balancing act it in place, the artistry in it  makes it look like it shouldn’t stay up at all.

We return to the ‘sculpture park’ today so I can take a photo of this phenomenon for this blog, only to find there's not a single tower left and no sign that there has ever been one. All we see is a normal beach of pebbles and rocks haphazardly strewn all around us. The order which people had temporarily brought to the beach has returned to chaos. This gets me wondering - how has this happened? It was too far up from the sea for the tide to have toppled the towers (although I would like to have witnessed that!) I think the creative impulse of people which we had witnessed in the towers had been balanced out by the destructive impulse of others (i.e. someone came along and kicked them all down!)

In order to get a photo of a stone tower to illustrate the phenomenon I built one myself (see above). Maybe someone will see it, be inspired to build one just as I was and then the whole cycle of creativity and destruction will start all over again.

16th April 2011