An interactive sculpture that a viewer touches to activate sounds of journeys taken by silica: the daily train transporting sand from a King’s Lynn quarry to glass factories in northern England; and a sonification of light waves from a supernova explosion representing the start of the journey taken by silica to the Earth’s crust from which all glass is made.

I made the sculpture as part of the Ground Up residency on extraction at GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, during which I focused on silica, the raw material for one of my main artistic mediums, glass. Silica features in multiple ways in my practice, from the silica in the moulds I make for glass casting, to the silica in the glass itself, the use of actual flints in artwork and even, in my interactive installations, in the silica used in silicon chips inside microcontrollers. During the residency, I visited a quarry (Sibelco) on the Leziate sand bed around King’s Lynn. Over 800, 000 metric tonnes of sand per year are extracted at Sibelco, that supplies over 50% of the UK’s glass industry’s sand. Sand Train, itself cast in a mould of Leziate sand using waste glass from the local factory of Caithness Crystal, is an expression of my learning about the source and extraction of silica, and its ecological implications.

When touched, Sand Train acts as a trigger for sound that evokes the journeys of silica, cosmic and terrestrial. When you touch it, you hear two sounds – a 1998 recording of the Sand Train passing by on the way to glass factories and a sonification of the X-ray light waves emanating from a Supernova, representing the original journey silica made from an exploding star to the Earth’s crust*. The sonification was developed from a project with Bellwether Collective, my collaborative practice with international artists Kristine Diekman and Lisa Mansfield, using astronomer James Trayford’s STRAUSS sonification tool for lightwaves recorded by NASA.

* Rho, J., Gomez, H. et al. 2018 ‘A dust twin of Cas A: cool dust and 21 μm silicate dust feature in the supernova remnant G54.1+0.3’. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 479: 4, October 2018, pp. 5101–5123.