Construction (of) sight

Team work

Sunday 20th September 2009: The weather was … ahem … ‘picture perfect’. Dennis Massoud, Bruce Maguire and I got started at 7.30 am, pegging out the … sight. High tide, and the first team of co-creators (Manly Art Gallery staff and volunteers), arrived at 9 am.

Team work some more

And sow … dot dot dot … to the present

Well ok, Braille on Manly Beach is now in the past, but it’s still a present in the sense of a gift. To and from: Louis Braille. On his 200th birthday.

Braille (brl) rocks

A Manly passer-by works out the message, writes ‘brl rocks’ on the palm of his hand in biro and photographs it. ‘brl’ is the contraction of ‘braille’. There are lots of contractions in Braille – makes it faster to read.

Flashback: August 2008

Our first trial of the prototype mold. The project was being called ‘BOB’ at that stage: Braille on the Beach. We were aiming for Queenscliff Beach back then, but it proved to be too difficult to do it there. The intertidal zone can become very steep and changeable and the swell might have wiped out our hard work prematurely.

In the foreground: 2 upright shovels, 2 plastic buckets, 4 people (3 women, 1 man) filling perspex mold with sand. In the background, white surf pounds Manly Beach.

in the foreground: 3 upright shovels, 2 buckets, a freshly shovelled mound of sound, a large clear perspex dome-shaped mold. in the background: figures approaching from the back of the beach.

In the beginning was the word and the word was in Braille!

Only 7 sleeps to go until the BOMB goes off. No, it’s not a terrorist activity. It’s: Braille on Manly Beach.