Ephemeral Works Of Art

Calvin Siebert’s sandcastles teach us two things - first, everything you can imagine is real and second, nothing lasts forever. His ephemeral artworks tend to cast a fragile and almost poetic perspective on the landscapes in which they are created.

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Huge, beautiful and transitory, Calvin Siebert’s artistic and clever moulds of sand resembling brutalist architecture add a simple poignancy to their surroundings and force onlookers to pause and hold them in awe. Adopting a variety of abstract and concrete forms, these artworks have a preoccupation with and devotion to the landscape themselves, highlighting the natural process that helps to both create and destroy the pieces.

Talking to Calvin Siebert, the mastermind behind these stunning structures, we learnt that some of his best art is doomed to have but a limited existence and invariably disappears leaving behind no trace at all.

Growing up in Colorado, Calvin spent a lot of time at construction sites. Back then the artist was thousands of miles away from a beach but that did not stop him from building castles out of the massive mounds of sand. Calvin, now 59, shares, “I was always interested in architecture. My abstract constructions often mimicked the buildings around my parents’ home. Whenever I had a pile of sand, I’d build sandcastles.”

A few decades later, Siebert is still building sandcastles. His castles resemble less the complicated towers and moats of fairy tales now and more the brutalist structures of his architectural inspirations.