First There is a Mountain

PORTHCRESSA BEACH, ST MARY’S, ISLES OF SCILLY

A new participatory artwork by Katie Paterson to be choreographed over British Summer Time 2019

First There is a Mountain is a new artwork by Katie Paterson that connects the public to the world’s diverse mountains ranges. Touring from 31 Mar – 27 Oct 2019, the project involves the creation of a set of ‘buckets and spades’ in the form of world mountains, from which the public will be invited to build mountains of sand across the UK coastline and play out the world’s natural geography against a series of tidal times.

The artwork will tour to 25 coastal venues around the UK, who will each stage a sand pail building event on their local beach. Participants will sculpt beaches into thousands of mountains of sand to form micro-geologies. Join us on Porthcressa Beach to build a range of sand pail mountains.

Each pail is a scale model of five of Earth’s mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Shasta (USA), Mount Fuji (Asia), Stromboli (Europe), and Uluru (Oceania), are nested together. Paterson carefully selected each mountain range via exacting research, using data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The sand pails are made from 100% fermented plant starch and are fully bio-compostable. At the end of the tour, they will be composted, reabsorbing back into the natural environment from which they were created.