A sand sculpture at the pandal of Jairam Youth Sporting Club in Adityapur on Monday. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Grains of sand can add up to great art.

Proving this are sculptures at a Puja pandal, made by artist Sudarshan Pattnaik’s protégé Dasarath Mohanta.

Eighteen-year-old local boy Dasarath, part of Pattnaik’s team that worked on the world’s biggest sand sculpture of Jesus Christ at Puri beach earlier this year, has given shape to four artistic structures at Jairam Youth Sporting Club pandal in Adityapur, 6km from the city.

The quartet, already grabbing viewer attention, are also spreading four messages.

They comprise saving the girl child, trees and pesticides, the planet and heritage.

Dasarath, who recently joined BK College of Art and Crafts in Bhubaneswar, however, admitted that working on sands from Kharkai river was quite bugging, literally.

“We are used to working on sands of both sea and rivers. But the material we got from Kharkai was full of insects. It made the task very difficult as insects went on making burrows. It took a lot of efforts on our part to get the insects removed from the sand,” said Dasarath, who along with his five-member team, completed the work in less than a week from September 22 to 28.

For each sculpture, they had at least one dumper of sand to work on.

Asked about the procedure, Dasarath’s 16-year-old brother artist Dilip Kumar, who is also a part of the team, said water was the main glue that kept the sculpture in shape.

“The models are maintained by spraying only water. At the moment we are sprinkling water twice a day,” the young artist added.

Patron of the Puja committee and Ichagarh MLA Arvind Singh said that photographs of sand art printed in newspapers and images shown on television fascinated everyone.

“We always try to do something different to catch attention of the masses. People have started really appreciating the sand sculptures and especially the messages that these convey,” said Singh who has been supervising the Puja for the last three decades.

The team has been paid Rs 1 lakh for the sand quartet.

Pattnaik and his team of 25 students, including Dasarath, created the world’s biggest sand sculpture of Jesus that found place in the Limca Book of World Records. They had made a 35ft-high and 75ft-wide sculpture, using 1,000 tonnes of sand.