Photo: Polina Teif, courtesy of the artist
Snail work, or give the colours what turns you please (dans les cérémonies) (2024) is a large floor installation made of sand saturated with pigments ranging in colour from deep red to bright yellow to emerald green. The sand is meticulously arranged in long, slightly uneven, scalloped stripes that reference the Turkish and Persian tradition of marbled end-paper, which was appropriated by European colonial empires and then became widespread in Victorian-era books. Involving submerging paper in a tray filled with floating paints, marbling techniques are known for their unruliness and unpredictability. Rather than doing away with those characteristics, Shannon Garden-Smith embraces them. In the context of this paper-based tradition, the term “snail-work” refers to the delicate snail-shell — like spiral patterns created by turning motions. Garden-Smith invites viewers to perform snail-work themselves by swirling the sand in the work, which enhances the indeterminateness of the marbling process and carves out space for the murky and slow-paced destruction of the temporary in situ installation.
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