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Over the course of the day of setting up the collaborative exhibition, Fab Lab, I participated in the construction of a time-based sculpture, Tideline/timeline. The act of construction began at low-tide, about 10:30am, when I walked from the Brewery Tap UCA Project Space, where the exhibition was held, to the beach about 15 minutes away. The low tide exposed much of the beach as it sloped gradually down to the sea, revealing the subtle gradient of dry to wet sand. Upon this first visit I filled four plastic bags with sand exposed at the water's edge - sand only exposed at low-tide. I carried these bags back to the exhibition space, taking about 30 minutes due to the weight of my load and the incline of the hill. I placed these bags on the floor of the space, and returned to repeat the endeavour.

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Each succession of sand-collection not only exposed less and less sand with the rising of the tide, but also the passing of time as I moved back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It was a moving with the tide. As I came back for more sand and carried it back to the space, so too did the tide: rising to fill and smoothen the hole I had left before retreating again, and then rising again to reclaim yet more of the beach, and then retreating once more. We were moving together, but it would not wait for me. Really, it did not move with me at all - I was moving with it. And because I only took sand from the water's edge, by the end I had taken sand from each part of the beach that would become submerged throughout the day. 

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Eventually the sea reached its high-tide at about 4:30pm. By this point I had spent the whole day trudging back and forth so as to keep pace with the rising tide. The sand I collected at high-tide was bone dry, soft and fine. I laid the final bags down in the linear sculpture that reflected the toil of the day. The gradient of colour I saw at the beginning of the day at low-tide - the soft darkening from dry to wet sand - was demonstrated again in the sculpture - this time at high-tide. It was as if I had made a beach of my own, reflective not only of time but of my relationship with it on that day - my relationship with the movements of the moon as it pushes and pulls the sea in and out, moving in synchronicity with my own back-and-forth, to-and-fro, in-and-out. Timeline/tideline is a sculptural memoire to my dancing with the sea and the moon.

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Within this context there is a relation between sand and the passage of time, only in this instance it is not falling through the hourglass but drying as the tide climbs the beach from which it came.