These are not icons of worship, but impressions of it. In the Sand Madonnas, religious imagery is filtered through an elemental medium - quartz sand - and held in fragile suspension. Familiar forms emerge: a Madonna and Child, a veiled face, a gesture of care. But they appear worn, uncertain, as though glimpsed through time, or dust, or failing memory.
There is no painterly gesture here. No brushstrokes. The images feel as if they’ve settled - not applied, but revealed — like something exposed by erosion or excavation. Detail dissolves into granules. Edges blur. What remains is presence, softened by process.
Despite their devotional lineage, these figures do not radiate certainty. They neither console nor command. They hover. The material insists on impermanence. Sand, after all, doesn’t hold. It drifts. It accumulates. It forgets.
And yet, something persists. A tenderness. A quiet awe. These are not declarations of faith, but questions about its endurance - about how time wears at meaning, and whether what once inspired devotion can still be felt, even faintly, now. Like the hourglass in the metaphysical poet John Hall’s poem, we glimpse not just the passing of time, but the erosion of certainty itself: How art thou nothing, when th’ art most all?
Perhaps the Sand Madonnas ask whether belief - not only in the divine, but in humanity - is shifting. Fading not into cynicism, but into something gentler, more provisional. A soft insistence that even as forms dissolve, a trace of their grace may still remain.
