Stone
Sculpting stone is a slow process of hammer and chisel and diamond cutting and polishing. Then, hand polishing with wet and dry, up to ten grades to the final finish. A balance of worked and unworked surfaces allows the material to present its place, sometimes adding texture.
My effort as a sculptor is to express the stony feel of our landscape in simple forms. In stone, from the local beaches of Cornwall, we can easily see the writhing of the earth’s cooling crust under pressure.
The Lizard Peninsula is one of the few places where deeper mantle layers have been exposed on the surface in the many varieties and colours of Serpentine rock. Cornish granite stretches from Bodmin to Lands End, varying in colour and density. Gabbro and even the hard elvan can be worked to reveal the inner shine.
As with life written in the grain, the very material of stone tells the story. ‘The universe in a grain of sand’ as Blake puts it. In any stone sculpture, this remnant of the earth’s formation is also spinning and spiralling through expanding space. Local landscapes of trees and rock can be read as a language of time, slow and slower.
Check a map to see how many old granite quarries there are in Cornwall; many worked within living memory, remnants of a huge building industry before concrete blocks. In the symbolism of stone, we live on the cooled coalescence of stardust.
“The same energy of Nature in the thrust of the earth is seen in Cornwall’s serpentine and granite rock formations, cooled and hardened to the ground beneath our feet. Stone carving is slower work, yet these shapes remind us that the earth can move. It was once liquid, cracking, cooling, and grinding surfaces under enormous pressure, and the landscape we can easily see on the coast of Cornwall is where the sea eats at the land. There is a great variety of stone here, from Devonian slate to serpentine, gabbro, elvan and granite, and many mixtures in between. Each requires its technique of working for hardness, texture and colour, especially the medium of serpentine.”
— Samvado
Sculpture in Cornwall
