Artists: Bo Kim - Carolina Aguirre - Divine Southgate-Smith - Emii Alrai - Li Li Ren - Pia Ortuño - Richard Burton - Unyimeabasi Udoh

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”
Epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
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. Like most aspects of Eliot’s poem, the line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ has multiple meanings and interpretations. On one hand it can be seen as a biblical reference alluding to the Christian burial tradition (“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”) and on the other 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. Eliot, heavily influenced by the Romantic poets, viewed contemporary life as something akin to Shelley’s description of Ozmandias’ former-empire where “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This 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, while indigenous cultures such as the Navajo in North America have a long tradition of sand painting used in healing ceremonies, and for hundreds of years Buddhist monks have created meticulous, symmetrical mandalas using coloured sand as a form of spiritual practice.

In Greco-Roman art, sand frequently appears in representations of the Titan Cronus (Saturn), the god of time, and in allegorical depictions of the waning sands of time. During the Renaissance, the figure of father time - the physical personification of time - began to appear, often holding an hourglass, which would become the quintessential visual and philosophical symbol of mortality and the passing of time. The hourglass then appeared frequently in Vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in the Dutch and Flemish traditions, where artists such as Pieter Claesz and Harmen Steenwijck depicted hourglasses alongside skulls, wilting flowers, and rotting fruit to symbolise the brevity of life.

More recently, in the twentieth century, artists like Salvador Dali looked to solidify this idea of sand as representational matter corresponding to the distortion of time and memory. The arid landscape seen in The Persistence of Memory (1931) is festooned with melting clocks, reinforcing the idea that time itself is amorphous, immaterial, slipping away, much like sand through fingers. Forty years later artists such as Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy 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.

In Handful of Dust artists are working with or referencing sand in new and intriguing ways. South Korean artist Bo Kim adheres sand to the surface of sheets of traditional Hanji paper which are then layered onto painted canvases, allowing the sand to emphasise the delicate, undulating texture of the paper as it absorbs the acrylic paint. Divine Southgate-Smith’s work often explores the relationship between heritage and time, taking a particular interest in temporal loops and circuits. Her work in Handful of Dust features cassava flour - commonly used in her native Togo - placed in a shell that resembles both an hourglass and the outline of the infinity symbol, placed flat so the flour is in constant stasis. Pia Ortuno’s practice is concerned with the earth and our relationship to it. She often goes mudlarking on the Thames, digging up nails and coins from the earth that form part of her compositions. Here she uses dyed sand, applying it to circular sculptural works that resemble clock faces, with an abstract formulation of numbers demarcated by strips of metal.

Li Li Ren uses volcanic sand in her casting process, producing sculptures of hands and other limbs that are glazed with resin and interact with amorphous glass shapes that highlight the physical difference in material while striking a similar aesthetic chord. Richard Burton is heavily influenced by Science-fiction, in particular the synthetic environments that cause a kind of emotional disconnect with those experiencing them. He plays with this tension between the natural and synthetic by mixing sand into his oil paints, producing a rich, grainy texture on the canvas. Emii Alrai’s work taps into a neolithic aesthetic, using sand-rubbed cardboard cladding as a structural backdrop to a stone installation. Carolina Aguirre uses gofun in her paintings: a white pigment predominantly used in Japanese painting that is made from crushed oyster shells. This marine powder is the basis of a practice deeply rooted in the natural world, fusing elements of the human body with more abstract natural forms. Unyimeabasi Udoh’s installation references the Minimalism of the 1970s, and the notion that the attribution of meaning, within an artistic context or otherwise, is completely contextual. Preferring to play with notions of agency and unearth humour in artistic creation, Udoh likes to view the work in Handful of Dust as both a reference to an intellectual art historical tradition, while simultaneously acknowledging the simplistic formal qualities of the work.

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 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 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 meditation on ephemerality and a reflection on the beauty and inevitability of transformation.