Whoosh. Cripes: it has been more than a year since I last wrote about my life with the snail trails. In fact it has been about a year since I worked on this project. I have some other snail trail stuff I want to try, but not just now.

Thus and hence, this update marks the conclusion of … whatever this was. Let’s call it phase 1.

To refresh our memories:

+ I photographed a complicated snail trail on a low tide beach, then tried/failed to figure out what path the snail had taken to make this trail.

+ I took the photo into Adobe software, figuring I could color and manipulate the image to detect the path.

+ I never detected the path but coloring it led to many interesting images, some of which I shared in Snail Trail posts 1-12.

+ My next ‘failure’ arose when I tried to organize the images into a single poster.

+ Some of the images, including this one, told me they wanted to be displayed alone.

… OK, that concludes our stroll down memory lane.

I printed and framed 3 of the solo snail trails. Each snail trail wanted an entirely different frame and it took a long time to understand what they wanted. They are more fussy than I am.

Here they are, decked out in their frames. Two of them got to join an exhibit at the local Arts Center!

(And even juxtaposing these 3 reminds me why it was so squirrelly, trying to put 30-40 colored trails on a poster…)

Unplanned, unexpected, rarely understood, this snail trail project has been so important to me! It remarkably shifted my creative process. I’ve learned and discovered so much. And perhaps the coolest discovery of all came a few months after I set the trails aside.

I happened upon a web page that discussed sandroing, an indigenous performance art in Vanuatu. Sandroing artists tell a story with words and song while their finger creates a design in sand; they wipe away the design to conclude the performance. Times being what they are, some of these ephemeral performances persist on You Tube. And in the first one I watched, the design looked staggeringly similar to the original of the snail trail I spent so many months trying to color and understand! (Frustrated to report that I can no longer find that particular video … so… still ephemeral, just not so immediately so…)

My takeaway from this: I am on the right path. I have no clue what that path is, or where it leads, but I intend to keep following it, as best I can!

Meanwhile, back at the tidepool, I fell in love with bean clam shells like these:

which launched a new project, still very much evolving. More on that to come.

Probably much more on that.

Soon.