Trying New Things
“Elbows in, chisel down, now hammer”.
The studio filled with noise as we all picked up our hammers and started bashing our stones.
This was stone sculpting 101, on the last day of our first week of the MA Arts + Place program at Dartington, UK. I was full of enthusiasm, rearing to try new things. Until standing at my designated bench space, I met my lump of stone for the first time.
It was like staring at a blank page of paper, but worse. This stone sculpting required me to think in 3D which is really not my strongpoint.
For two hours I fervently invoked the spirit of Michelangelo hoping for some imaginative spirit to arise and speak to me from the stone. I kept thinking the chisel marks were ‘emotive’ and raw – really they were my feeble attempts to coax this square of stone into life.
Our tutor showed us a vertebra of a prehistoric crocodile which was embedded into a stone she was once carving. A very rare occurrence, although not totally unexpected as shells and fossils have been found in stones before. As we cut our way into it, a slight sulphur smell wafted out. This is a particular feature of Portland stone, as it comes from Portland, an island off the Jurassic coast near Weymouth in Dorset.
She looked at my carving and spotted the curve of an embedded shell. I tried to follow its lines but couldn’t manage to release the shape of it. What emerged instead was a sort of anamorphic shape, similar to ones I have made in paper several years ago. I hadn’t started out with a clear plan or thinking about what to carve like some of the other students. I wanted the stone to speak to me instead.
Now I felt like it was whispering its story. It seemed to talk of ancient creatures and waterways, curving through the landscape. With ten minutes to go before the end of our experimental stone carving session, I had almost despaired of finding out what this stone had to share with me.
“Oh look, this could be where it’s eye belongs”, said the tutor. She gave me a hand drill and left me to create the eye of the stone creature. Amazing!
The creature starts to emerge
Add an eye and there it is!
