COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina State Fair is in full swing for day two, and a little rain can’t stop the fun. There are plenty of exhibits inside, like sand sculpting. Fair attendees can stop by to watch artists craft massive sculptures using only sand and water.
Charles and Cynthia Jumper have been coming to the fair for 48 years. Each time, they check out the sand sculptors to admire “the talent,” Cynthia said.
“Time,” Charles added.
“There's no glue, there’s no cement,” sculptor Brandi Glenn explained. “It’s just sand and water.”
Glenn and her husband Greg, with Sandscapes, travel to the fair from California to craft a sculpture by hand.
“We love coming back to this fair. So that's one of our favorite things,” Glenn said. “There's just a feeling of community here that you just don't always feel everywhere you go.”
Glenn tells me this is the couple’s 28th year here.
“The first day we're here, there's a lot of hugs because there's a lot of people who've come in who, you know, have been watching us for years and years and years. And it's like, you know, it's like seeing family,” Glenn explained. “It's a big family affair, and we really like that. It’s a very big sense of community here.”
Ethan Martin with Cutco says every year, the vendor sets up right next to the sculpture.
“We get to see it go from a pile of sand to what it ends up being at the end of the fair,” Martin said. “So it’s really cool for us, not to mention the crowd of people that end up at our booth.”
A crowd formed to see the couple at work for roughly eight hours a day, bringing the image in their mind to life.
“No pictures, no drawings. We're just…we have a huge file cabinet of stuff in our head, and we just kind of go, ‘Okay, what would work? With all the years we've been here, you know, sometimes we'll do more serious sculpture, sometimes we'll do more whimsical. Like this is more whimsical, I'm not going to say what it is yet. There is an end theme to this that is a surprise,” Glenn said about the current sculpture. “The sand really dictates what we're going to do because you can cut away a little chuck and a chunk will fall, and you’ll say, ‘Gosh, that was going to be this. Alright, now I gotta change it to this.’ So that's why we try to be very fluid in the process of building it.”
While Glenn says there’s about a week of work until the sculpture is finished, fair attendees are coming by to take pictures and see it for themselves.
“Every time I come, I look forward to seeing them,” Telena Lander and Diane Parthun-Mims said. “It’s interesting what they do because it's different every year.”
“I’d stay here all day and watch them ‘til it’s done, but everyone else wants to not do that,” Rita Zinn added.
You can find that sculpture in the back of the Cantey building.