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Weaving magic with hands on sand

Adroit fingers create enthralling images

PHOTOS: R. ASHOK

EPHEMERAL The thing of beauty.

A thing of beauty could be a joy forever. How then will it be when beauty beholds the eyes in its myriad forms? All at once! Only the enthralling images were ephemeral in the Sand Animation performed by French Artist David Myriam as a grand finale to the technical festival Pragyan '07 at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchi, on Sunday. Nevertheless, the images could easily drive hundreds in the student-dominated audience in the Barn - the auditorium - into ecstasy.

Forms of arts

A 37-year-old artist engaged in various forms of arts such as poetry and drawings on paper, his animation films; `A hole in the place of heart' and `Do you mind?' have been featured at a handful of international film festivals. David looks to nature to quench his quest for perfection. His performance at Pragyan was third in a week. The earlier ones were at Techfest of IIT Mumbai and Kshitij of IIT Kharagpur. At Pragyan, the live performance art came to fuller life the moment David applied sand to a surface and rendered images woven around the themes of `The birth of the Earth' and `The Dunes' by drawing figures by hand and made it visible on a light board. The display was projected on a screen using an overhead projector.

Roars of applause

David Myriam.

David was greeted with roars of applause. But he did not have the luxury to look up while at work. For the appearance of the audience, his hands and fingers moved at lightning pace and in a matter of seconds the screen portrayed images of deep sea life, the vast sky, lightning and rains, child in the womb... The mental deportation of the audience to the world of divinity was complete by then. With `Sand Dunes' David virtually brought the desert to the Barn.

He captured the life in the vistas of sand through depiction of weary travellers treading along with camel and resting around a campfire from different angles; in a way that a miniscule difference in the layering of sand would have made things amateurish. Such was the deftness.

The interregnums between the erasing of one image and making of the other were the precious moments of guess game for the audience.

He took to art at the tender age of eight years; but could discover his prowess in sand animation only eight years ago during the course of a workshop. There has been no looking back since then.

The warming climate and pollution of earth are the themes on which his adroit fingers would create images in the days to come.

R.KRISHNAMOORTHY

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