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 this past year 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

All images ©Daniel Ranalli