Snail Drawings by Daniel Ranalli

Artist/photographer Daniel Ranalli connects with the entropy of mother nature in this series of images entitled “Snail Drawings”. The Boston University professor builds on the idea of ephemeral art via interactions with his shelled collaborators, arranging them into creative patterns and shapes, then photographing them over time to illustrate how they break formation in trails of slow-moving chaos.

Daniel describes his motivations for this unique project:

“This is a series I have been working on for almost twenty years - on and off. Some years I don’t do any, others - like a couple of years ago when I traveled to Nova Scotia I engaged intensively with the project. The series is based on the drawings made by snails on the wet sand in the inter-tidal zone. They are part of an ongoing series of works involving collaboration between the snails and me. I choreograph the snails’ starting positions, and then photograph the marks they make over time. I tend to think of the snail pieces as a metaphor for the order we establish in our lives, and how the element of chance enters in to shape the result -regardless of how much we attempt to structure it. The works are usually in time sequences of two images made over a period of twenty to thirty minutes.”

All images courtesy of Daniel Ranalli. View more at his home page .