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Showing posts with label stone carving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stone carving. Show all posts

Monday, 6 April 2015

Saxon and modern stone carvings at the ancient church of St Laurence in Bradford-on-Avon

In the small town of Bradford-on-Avon, in the west of the county of Wiltshire, is one of the oldest churches in Britain. Despite evidence of subsequent alterations, some of them also ancient, it has been described as one of the most characteristic examples of a Saxon church in the country.


St Laurence's is certainly not a big building, but it contains some beautiful fragments of Saxon stone carving.
Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St_Laurence%27s_Church.JPG
The church was mentioned as standing in 1120 CE (or AD, if you prefer) by the twelfth century historian William of Malmsbury. He thought that it was built in the time of St Adhelm (in 709 CE) although other evidence suggests that it dates to the early eleventh century. However, it may have replaced an earlier wooden structure.  It was surrounded by other buildings and used for other purposes, before being 'rediscovered' in the nineteenth century.


The space inside, containing three rooms linked by surprisingly narrow archways, is not large but it is high with small windows. It gives the stone-built chapel a distinctive feel, not showy but not humble either. The walls may have once been plastered and painted, perhaps also draped with hangings. In Saxon times, surrounded by timber buildings, a stone building of this size in a small town must have been pretty grand in itself.


Fragments of Saxon carved stone are dotted throughout. There are two carved angels high up on one wall, which may well have once been part of a larger sculptural frieze:

Image from http://history.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/getimage.php?id=321
The altar is made up of several bits of Saxon stonecarving found in the area. The richness of the carvings found in its vicinity has led to the suggestion that the chapel may once have held relics of a saint. The church's website says that;

'A charter of King Æthelred granted Bradford to the nuns of Shaftesbury in 1001, and the church’s architecture suggests it was built for the nuns early in the eleventh century. St Laurence’s is a characteristic Anglo-Saxon building: tall and narrow with small windows. The extent and richness of its decoration, however, are rare, perhaps suggesting it was designed partly for the relics of Æthelred’s brother Edward the Martyr, which were housed with the nuns at Shaftesbury.'

saxon stone carvings

In 2012, the sculptor John Maine installed a three-part piece in the chapel above the altar. I think that it looks perfect in the setting and complements it well. At the top is a ring of Doulting stone carved by Maine. Below that is a piece of fossilised tree trunk thought to be about 150 million years old and below that is a fragment from a Saxon carved cross.



Bradford-on-Avon has several other interesting buildings, including a tithe barn and an interesting old town bridge with a building on it that was used as a cell for a while. Unfortunately I couldn't get photos of them during my visit but it's nice to be able to share this one with you.

Friday, 27 March 2015

Making plinths for stone sculptures, running carving workshops and emergency while-you-wait lettercutting!

There have been a lot of different, smaller jobs going on recently, as well as finishing off the huge Downs bench (which is very exciting).

First off, I have made three sculpture bases for a commission:



The bases were shaped from Honduran mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla). Once very popular in woodworking, this species is consequently endangered now in many areas and Brazil has banned export of its timber. Illegal logging is a threat to the existence of some Swietenia species such as this one and is a massive and very real problem.

I have to say that I wouldn't buy or use this timber unless it was absolutely, definitely recycled. The timber used in these bases had been left lying around unwanted for years by at least three previous owners and was in danger of being thrown away. I was very content to utilise it in those circumstances, but it seems important to mention the issue here. Woodworkers in the USA and UK are the main market for mahogany and so it is directly our responsibility to source materials like these carefully.

Yesterday was very happily spent teaching volunteers at the Tree Life Centre in Kingswood, Bristol.


The centre is run by the Trust for Conservation Volunteers and sells native trees and plants. We have been carving 'way in' and 'out' marker posts as well as oak signs for their Open Day on the 10th April that show different areas of the site. The volunteers came up with some great designs for them and I think that the signs look fantastic.


 I'm really looking forward to another day's carving there with visitors to the Open Day.


One other interesting job recently was a new kind in my experience: while-you-wait lettercutting! The people who contacted me had a very small, specific period of time in which they could drop by my studio and have a wooden object engraved. Luckily, I could stop by after running some workshops and managed to do their lettercutting for them while they waited at the studio. It was nice to be able to help them in such a tight time schedule on a piece that was obviously very important to them.

Image by C.S.

Thursday, 17 April 2014

Tout Quarry, Portland, Dorset. An open-air sculpture park full of artworks carved into the Portland and Purbeck limestones

tout quarry portland

Tout quarry is situated on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Portland limestone is a very well-known building material and has been used in the construction of many iconic structures, including St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London and the British Museum in London and the UN building in New York.

Since 1983, the year after quarrying at Tout ended, stone carvers have made carvings there and many of them can be seen by visitors. The quarry is accessible for free at any time, so some of the early works have been vandalised or damaged, but there are over 70 that can be found by looking carefully around the network of quarry paths.




The quarry is now officially closed to new carvings being added to the rocks and is a nature reserve. Stone carving lessons are taught in a corner that has been set aside for tuition. We were lucky to visit on a beautiful sunny spring day and got some nice photos of some of the work at Tout. If you would like to visit the site, be aware that you will need some stout footwear as the ground is pretty uneven and also watch out for steep drops and falling rocks.  

I wish that it was possible to tell you who did every piece, but by the time we passed the information board above I was pretty lost myself!

still falling antony gormley

This is probably the most famous sculpture at Tout. It was carved by the well-known sculptor Antony Gormley and is called 'Still Falling'.


'Drinking Bowl' was carved by Jonathan Sells

'Fallen Fossil' by Stephen Marsden is one of my favourite sculptures at Tout...



...as are 'Ascent' by Joe Hamilton...


...and 'Window' by Justin Nicol, which really comes alive when the evening sun hits it.

Here are a few others that are hidden about the quarry. Many have been carved in secret, so the noticeboards won't tell you who made them.













A group of Dutch carvers called Groupe 85 come over every year and have special permission to work on some large sculptures in one corner of the quarry. 








This large sculpture of an octopus or kraken had traces of the crayon used to mark out the design still on it, so has been worked on fairly recently.

I hope that you have enjoyed this post, showing just a few of the many sculptures to be found whilst searching around Tout quarry. 



Friday, 28 February 2014

Sculptures that contrast carved areas with uncarved surfaces; The Idea emerging from the Uncarved Block


One of the most charged moments in producing many carvings, particularly when whittling a shape from a piece of rough timber, is the moment when the sculpture is cut away from the piece of wood from which it has been carved. Sometimes I have been really torn as to whether I should take that step, as the sculpted piece looks so right against the uncarved timber that it emerges from.


I want to talk, in this post, about a few other carvings in which original block to be carved is present in the final piece.

Perhaps some of the most famous examples are the unfinished marble sculptures by Michelangelo known as the 'Prisoners'. These were carved between 1525 and 1530. The one below is sometimes called the 'Awakening Prisoner', sometimes the 'Awakening Slave':

Image from:http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11589&garpg=7

It's not certain whether Michelangelo stopped working on them because the building project that they were intended for was reduced in scale (the tomb of Pope Julius II, which was never completed to the original designs). That is the the usual interpretation, but I wonder if he just decided that the sculptures expressed what he was looking for and left them at that. Michelangelo saw himself as freeing the image created in a sculpture from within the confines of the uncarved block and that is certainly the feeling that these marble sculptures get across.

According to Rick Steves (mentioned in http://thosecrazyschuberts.com);
'Michelangelo believed the sculptor was a tool of God, not creating but simply revealing the powerful and beautiful figures he put in the marble. Michelangelo’s job was to chip away the excess, to reveal. He needed to be in tune with God’s will, and whenever the spirit came upon him, Michelangelo worked in a frenzy, often for days on end without sleep.'

Another sculptor who used the shape of the rough, unfinished block in their final sculptures was Auguste Rodin. This sculpture, produced in 1898, is 'The Hand of God', sometimes known as 'Creation' or as 'The Hand of the Devil':


Image from:http://bycommonconsent.com/2011/05/08/religious-art-the-hand-of-god/


In common with a lot of famous sculptors, Rodin would have modelled the sculpture in clay and then one of his assistants would have carved it into the marble. However, Bernard Champigneulle wrote that  his use of uncarved areas in the design was influenced by Rodin's initial career as a stonecutter. He would have understood the 'exhilaration' that came from 'the tussle between man and recalcitrant matter, with the removal of stone which could never be replaced, with the contest between a hand-held tool and an inanimate block from which life was about to spring.' On possible influences for this design technique, Champigneulle noted that 'Rodin's visit to the unfinished tombs of San Lorenzo (partly designed by Michelangelo for the Medici family in Florence) had taught him that to leave some areas unfinished could enhance the impact of others. Where Michelangelo had left marble untouched because time did not permit him to complete his task, Rodin did so deliberately. The delicacy of his modelling benefited by this contrast, which displayed the sculptor's skill to even greater advantage.'

Gilles Néret says that 'Though accused of making excessive use of the unworked surface, Rodin was again far ahead of his time; he appealed to the imagination rather than to the roles of sculptural convention.' It was certainly a controversial technique and ruffled the feathers of the nineteenth-century art establishment.

Whilst chatting to Joachim Seitfudem (who carved the sculptures below), he noted that many traditional Bavarian limewood sculptures use the unworked surface of the log (with bark removed) to frame the carvings emerging from within. Jo's father is a master carver in Bavaria.



Giuseppe Penone is not specifically a woodcarver, but was one of the leading figures in the influential 'Arte Povera' movement that developed in Italy in about 1967. Artists associated with Arte Povera used inexpensive, often found, materials to make artworks. Penone was very interested in making sculptures that reconnected people to the natural environment and since the 1970's he has been making these sculptures, in which a growth ring inside a wooden beam is revealed by carefully cutting away the wood around it. 



This reveals an echo of  the tree at one point in its growth. In 'The 20th Century Art Book' published by Phaidon, each of these works is identified as 'an act of reclamation, an attempt to discover the natural shape of the tree within the man-made form.'



The resulting sculptures seem to me to share a lot in common with the others shown in this post and must be every bit as painstaking to produce. Sometimes, Penone would make the work in a gallery during the course of an exhibition.

Image: Sphilbrick from wikimedia.org

One piece of sculpture that really made an impression on me when I first saw it is 'Hinewai Calling from the Mist' by the New Zealand sculptor Paul Deans. The piece is carved from an old, found gatepost and illustrates a Maori legend about 'Uenuku and the Mist Girl', which you can read by clicking on this link to a previous post on this blog.


Image courtesy of Paul Deans


Apart from the great, dynamic use of contrast between the smoothly carved areas, areas of toolmarks and the rough, weathered original surface of the post, the way that the rough texture of the weathered timber is used to portray the thick mist around the face really appeals to me. 

Maskull Laserre, who is based in Montreal, Canada, carves delicate forms emerging from everyday objects. I like the way that he will use more than one object put together to form the timbers into which he carves. Maskull works mainly with power tools to get these delicate sculptures. Personally, I'd prefer to see some of the carved skeletal shapes sculpted to a smoother, finer, more bone-like finish so that they would stand out more clearly from the tool marks in the timber around them. That doesn't take away from the fact that it's a great idea and these pieces are getting a lot of well-deserved attention at the moment.






http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/01/maskull-lasserre/

Finally, here's another one of my sculptures from about 1998. It was carved from a weathered piece of beech wood found in Derbyshire's beautiful Peak District. At the time, I was interested in imagining a world where every detail could be synthetically created, down to stones and pieces of wood, so that they could also have 'intelligence' and interact with their environment.


So, sometimes areas of a sculpture might be left uncarved as part of the story that the sculptor is trying to convey, sometimes those areas frame carved areas and sometimes those areas are just the result of the project being unfinished. The narrative and aesthetic tension that Rodin tried to convey, between carved and uncarved surfaces, still seems to be an important reason for carvers including this contrast in a design. 
Perhaps another attraction for a carver is that the sculpture emerging from the block allows them to reveal another narrative, that of the work that went into producing such a carving, in a way that a completely finished sculpture might not show.
There is also something very compelling about seeing the carved work emerge from the block. It is like a glimpse of the making process, a way for the viewer to connect more closely with the hands of the maker.