01907 Spring 2024

26 | 01907
Gary White uses
a shovel to dig
into the sand.
SCULPTURES, continued from page 24
to soccer balls to astronauts, employing tools primarily acquired
from the dollar store or crafted from household objects. The
beginning of a sculpture, for example, starts with the cut-up
midsection of a kitty-litter container serving as a mold, and
White also employs a 5-gallon bucket with the bottom removed.
To craft a sphere, White reaches for the lid of a peanut-butter jar.
Before arriving in Nahant, White had never worked with sand,
but he explains he learned to do so quickly.
“This was more perfect than I can imagine,” he says. “It's very
easy to carve. But also the frame of mind you get into is, it doesn't
matter because it's going to be broken within minutes, hours. It
forces me to do things I’d be too reluctant to do otherwise.”
Sand allows White flexibility not found in other materials like
stone, where one misstep could set him back hours. On the beach,
White finds freedom in the ability to let go.
He explains he often creates two sculptures at a time. He will
know exactly what to do for one but have no plan for the other,
letting the sand itself guide his path. Nine times out of 10, he
says the better result is the one he didn’t make a plan for.
“It's not precious anymore. It's not something I'm afraid to
mess up. There’s no pressure, I don’t have to impress anybody,” he
says. “Messing around is a big part of finding the idea.”
In fact, White says he almost always has a sense of fear when
he heads to the beach because he doesn’t know where the day will
take him.
But once he actually gets to work, a plan develops in real time
as he figures out what the sand wants to be.
“The most important part is listening and looking, paying
attention to what is there and what it wants to become, what it
wants to make clear,” he says.
Creating a sculpture is a delicate balance, with White needing
the right mix of sand and water to ensure the structure is able to
support itself. So much of his process is based on feel, knowing
what consistency the sand needs to be before he lifts the mold
away, or knowing just how long to let it dry before adding
another layer or shape on top.
White, though, says those finer details came quickly to him
as he began experimenting on the beach, in part because of his
experience carving other materials like wood and stone in his
professional life.
“The same way about not being afraid to mess up is where
you figure out how far you can go,” he says. “After once or twice,
having something fall off, you get a sense of how much weight
can be cantilevered over.”
“Trial and error… and not that much error,” he adds.
And White’s teaching background is often on full display
during the summer, when he spends hours at a time on the beach
working away. As he constructs and carves, White draws the
attention of children on the beach, who become curious about
what he’s doing. Those children often get a lesson from White
himself and, just as he does, become completely riveted by the
process.
White explains he has seen children, whose parents say they
are never able to focus otherwise, spend hours working on
sculptures on the beach.
“It’s fun to make something, but just the process of making
something takes away all your woes,” he says. “You’re not
concerned about anything.”
It’s the process itself that White loves, letting everything else
fall away as he fixates on the project in front of him.
“Once I start working on something, I could be in the cellar,
in the dark,” he says. “The moment is engrossing, it’s all that
matters.”