When most people go to the beach, all they see is sand – but sculptor Jenny Rossen sees a massive blank canvas.
“I’ve been to Dubai so often that I know the sand here really well,” says the 50-year-old Australian. “The beautiful brown, untampered, sweet soil sand is perfect to carve my sandcastles.”
Rossen has been moulding sand into whimsical designs for parks and malls all over the world for 25 years. She recently completed a seven-tonne sandcastle, complete with wind towers, domes and minarets, at The Beach in Dubai. This month, the public can take part in sand-sculpting workshops run by Rossen’s team every weekend, and add to her latest project.
This is the second time the artist has been commissioned to create sand art on The Beach. Two years ago, she created a 200-tonne sculpture showcasing the UAE’s traditional Islamic architecture.
“This time, it’s a small, fun community project,” says the artist, who moved to Dubai in 2000 but left two years ago to settle with her family in Australia.
“So we will be running workshops where children and anyone who is young at heart will be taught how to make Arabic-style architecture designs. We’ll be showing them how to carve turrets that look like wind towers, minarets, old forts and buildings – but it will all have a quirky element to it.”
Rossen majored in advertising and filmmaking in her 20s but quickly lost interest in those subjects and switched to classical sculpturing and painting.
But being a conventional artist in Australia wasn’t paying the bills – and that was when her leisure time spent on the beach playing with sand turned into a lucrative opportunity.
“I used to go down to the beach and make sand castles for myself and people used to put money on my towel,” she says.
“At first, I found that rude because I wasn’t a beggar. But then I started getting quite a lot of money and then it didn’t seem so bad.”
She started approaching shopping malls and parks for small commissions. As word got out, she bagged bigger sand-sculpture projects in the United States and Europe, which she built with teams.
Rossen says she has always tried to challenge herself with outrageous designs and is confident that “if you can think it, I can carve it”.
Once, she says, she boastfully suggested a fire-breathing sand dragon as a design to a client in China for their new-year celebrations. Delivering that was one of her biggest achievements.
“I said, let’s do a giant dragon with fire coming out of its mouth, and they got excited,” she says.
“But when we started putting it together the jaw kept falling off because the fire had steam in it. It dropped off four times before my team and I figured it out. So I know now to prepare myself for every conceivable thing that can go wrong.”
Rossen says she often goes with the flow of the location when suggesting a design that will aesthetically blend in with the surroundings. For her recent work in Dubai, she was inspired by images of the UAE’s heritage.
“But in keeping with my style, even that has a hippie look and is all swirly,” she says.
Rossen ordered a special golden-brown sand without stones from Dubai Garden Centre for her sculpture. She had a team help her build the sand up, but carved the structure herself.
In addition to the current work, Rossen has her sights set on her next UAE project: she wants to return to the country to build a sand-sculpture park.
“The dream is to make a park with sand castles that people can walk through,” she says. “They’d be schools and malls made of sand. I’d like to call it the sand forest of Dubai.”
• Workshops will be held every Friday and Saturday on The Beach, opposite Surf Bite, from 2pm to 10pm. Tickets are Dh30. For details, visit www.facebook.com/TheBeachDubai
aahmed@thenational.ae
