Sands of Time 1 (2021) Painting by Melissa Goodenough

Desert Sand, Acrylic and Epoxy Resin on Canvas

Territory.

The word comes from the Latin ‘Terra’, meaning ‘Land’, the greatest keeper of stories.

Her memories are stored in the photo albums of Her sedimentary layers, revealing histories long before ours.

Compacted over eons, shifting as She breathes, in, out, life, death. Her breath erodes and scatters the very structures she is made up of into tiny grains of sand. Each one is a memory of what once was.

Rolling desert sands that tell the stories of Her mountainous curves, over 70 million years old, and seashells found almost impossibly far inland, reminding us that this all was once an ocean bed that has since receded to reveal the history underneath.

The artist was inspired by a trip into the desert, where she collected samples of different types of sand of varying colours, textures and origins. She prepared the pigments by grinding the rocks and sand into smaller and smaller particles, until they were small enough to remain in suspension when immersed in water.

The solution was then dehydrated in the sun until all that remained was a cake of extremely fine pigment, to be ground up again and combined with an acrylic medium.

Some of the larger particles that sunk in the water were also dried out and mixed with medium to create a lovely, gritty paint that was used in parts of the outer layers for texture.

In this project the following dichotomies were explored:

spontaneous / controlled (in the application)
warm / cold and vivid / muted (in the colour palette)
natural / man-made and historical / contemporary (in the materials used)

...all representing the land that inspired these works.

Related themes

Mixed MediaEpoxy Resin ArtSand ArtworkEarthy Natural NeutralAcrylic Painting