Gerry Kirk is the only event planner we know who's built a career out of sand. Literally. As founder of SandWorld International, an event-production company in Solana Beach, CA, he's spent the past 16 years organizing sand-sculpting events and competitions, most notably for Sandblasters, a reality TV show aired last month on the Travel Channel.
Trained at the California Institute of the Arts, Kirk first worked for a Disney artchitect, and got into sand sculpting when a friend asked him to build a sand replica of an addition to a San Diego hotel for a fundraising party. Then the San Diego CVB invited him to build a sand sculpture of the city skyline for a travel convention in Chicago, and he suddenly had a new career, plying his trade at conventions and trade shows, and organizing teambuilding events for Honda and other firms.
In 1990, Kirk founded the World Sand Sculpting Academy (WSSA) out of frustration at a lack of standards in the field. He and other sculptors "had been going around the country entering sand-sculpting competitions, and some had rules and some didn't," he recalls. "Often the judges had no experience or understanding [of what made a good sand sculpture]. They'd pick a cow with a flower in its mouth!" So Kirk and his cohorts devised some rules (e.g., sand onlyno paint or foreign objects; don't pollute the beach, etc.) and launched the WSSA, then later SandWorld, to promote sand sculpting and train artists in the medium.
Against the Grain
For Sandblasters, Kirk had four months to plan and eight beaches to inspect. That's less fun than it sounds: From Imperial Beach outside Tijuana north to Santa Monica, Kirk measured each beach and analyzed its sand for grain size, density, and compactibility. After first selecting Santa Monica, the TV production crew switched the locale a month out to San Diego's Pacific Beach. For Kirk, that meant spending another day beach-measuring, sand-testing, building large moundsand blowing them up.
You read that right. The producers decided a normal sand-sculpting contest wouldn't be exciting enough for viewers, so Sandblasters not only shortened the typical timeframe from six days to two and a half, it added an element of change: After teams spent a day sculpting, five sculptures would be detonated randomly, and those teams would start over on new sand piles in the second round, scrambling to complete their sculptures on time. The contestants were initially resistant, Kirk admits"Who likes to destroy art?"but after they understood the rationale, they "really got into it."
A Handful of Dust
After practice detonations to determine the distance at which exploding sand sculptures could be considered safe (15 feet), Kirk had to measure the new beach every day to factor in erosion: "By the time we filmed we'd lost two feet of beach." But what he realized found "eerie" was that two days after filming wrapped, Pacific Beach got hit by 20-foot waves that removed 30 percent of its sand. He deadpans, "What saved us was we paid homage to the tiki god of high surf."
Sandblasters Sand-Sculpting Competition
Size of crew: 12 (and 100-plus from the Travel Channel)
Time spent planning: 4 months
Cost: Over $1 million