Lately my sculptures have come full circle, returning to the techniques of my earlier career. As a monumental mason I would take a piece of stone and shape it for a purpose, for instance: flat for ease of lettering, arched for architectural conceit, and symbolically ornamented with crosses or flowers. The stone would be polished to bring out its beauty and provide a smooth surface to carve letters into. A gravestone’s form is often secondary to its function, its primary purpose being to bear an inscription in commemoration of a life.
In contrast, my polished boulder sculptures celebrate the stone itself. I choose them from many similar stones, selecting them with a mixture of knowledge, experience and intuition. I favour hard stones as they take a deeper polish and will keep that polish for decades longer than softer limestone or marbles. They are partly self-selecting as most of them are glacial erratics, this means they are hard enough to survive glacial travel and journeys down river courses. Softer stones tend to wear away to sand and silt.
The forms taken by these hard stones tend to be of large chips and shards which are flatter or more angular the harder they are. Some boulders have rolled and tumbled to soft forms that I accentuate when shaping with a grinder, others have angular edges that tend to be pulled into curving lines as two planes meet. Some of these boulders are true glacial erratics and I have picked them up from my travels and from stone yards and building sites I have worked on over the years. Some were already in the gardens of houses I have rented.
The erratic series sculptures are named simply by the places where I found them, at times creating descriptive poetic tensions such as “Featherstone”.
