Punch Magazine August 2025

PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 95 that singer Alicia Keys danced among its hills. Brighton describes the sun casting shadows that played across the mounds throughout the day. “And at night, when you have the fire coming from the center, it shoots all the shadows perfectly, radiating out like a flower.” Shore Shout-outs “File this under things I didn’t know you could do with a rake! Beautiful work,” actor Will Smith commented after reposting one of Brighton’s designs on Instagram last year. He’s not the first celebrity to take notice. Ed Sheeran hired Brighton and other “sandy people” for a campaign to promote his album Subtract, with each artist contributing a piece that represented the album’s different tracks. Brighton has recently received recognition for adding text to his designs—everything from Queen lyrics to The Big Lebowski quotes. “Several bands have reposted my stuff,” he says, listing shout-outs from Green Day and Limp Bizkit. Many sand artists are more meditative and like to work silently, their only soundtrack the crashing of the waves, Brighton explains. But “music's really important to me and my buddy doused them in some flammable stuff and we lit them on fire. It was insane.” Another favorite project was one Brighton made with his dad for the Desert X international art exhibition in Saudi Arabia. “Angle of Repose” consisted of 364 concentric circles composed of pyramidshaped sand mounds that ranged in size from bread loaves to small houses, with a mountain of firewood at its center. The installation was so visually stunning

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==