And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Referencing the famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Handful of Dust brings together a group of emerging artists who either physically use or metaphorically respond to sand in their practice. A possible interpretation of Eliot’s line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ is that it can be viewed as a classical reference to the story of the Cumaen Sibyl that Eliot cites in the poem’s epigraph.
First mentioned in Petronius’ Satyricon, the Cumaen Sibyl is a character from Greco-Roman mythology who approaches Apollo at Mount Olympus, asking him to grant her as many years of life as grains of sand she holds in her hand. The Sibyl’s request is granted but, as she did not also ask for eternal youth, she is cursed to age and decay for eternity. The story likely resonated with Eliot as his poem looked to situate the spiritual desolation of post-war society within the context of a hopeless, meaningless trudge through a barren cultural landscape.
The poetic image of time slipping through our hands like grains of sand frames the exhibition, which also seeks to explore sand’s role in art history and the cultural ideas and tropes associated with the material. Sand has been a part of artistic creation for as long as we can ascertain: early humans used naturally pigmented sand to create images on cave walls, during the Renaissance the figure of father time began to appear, often holding an hourglass, and in the 20th Century the temporal desert works of Salvador Dali appeared, followed later by the work of land artists like Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy who used sand in large-scale environmental art projects that often highlighted the shifting, granular nature of the material that makes it such an apt symbol for impermanence, fragility, and the passage of time.
Handful of Dust explores the ways in which sand, as both material and metaphor, speaks to the transient nature of time, history, and memory. Just as Eliot’s The Waste Land conjures a fractured landscape haunted by the weight of the past, the works in this exhibition evoke the impermanence of existence - shifting, eroding, and reforming like dunes in the wind. Sand holds traces of what came before, yet resists permanence, mirroring the way cultures, identities, and personal histories are continuously shaped and reshaped. Through their varied approaches, the artists in this exhibition engage with the fundamental tension between preservation and loss, endurance and decay. Their works remind us that, much like the grains of sand slipping through the aperture of an hourglass, nothing can remain unchanged. In this way, Handful of Dust is both a melancholic meditation on ephemerality and a reflection on the beauty and inevitability of transformation.
