Thinking About Design - Mar/Apr 2004

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Created: Tuesday, 02 March 2004 03:14

With this article I hope to open up a discussion of the design ideas we use in our sculptures. I’ve chosen three of my pieces that are similar in approach as well as design. Decisions arising from materials, scale, and subject matter affect the form of a particular work before I begin actual design. Working primarily with granite and basalt, I can put sculptures outside where the public encounters them as part of their world rather than in a special “art” environment. I work in human scale, that is three to eight feet high, and frequently create pieces with a strong vertical axis rather than being horizontal or rounded. Viewers tend to respond physically and emotionally to such sculptures as if they were figures. I often refer to natural cycles: geological, biological, and human. I don’t intend to make literal representations, rather I depend on the power sculpture has to stimulate the observer’s own non-linear, non-verbal associations.

These considerations all came into play when designing ‘Snag’. It refers to a tree snag which, while at the end of its own life, generates further life by serving as a home and nursery for birds and wildlife. Although I occasionally do direct carving, ‘Snag’ is more typical in that I have a visual idea that I keep in my mind while developing the piece. I don’t work from drawings or maquettes, so the final design of the piece often changes during carving. A major means of seeing how the form would go as I laminated each stone was to visualize how the flow of energy would go up from the ground and through the tree.

As for the formal design elements, in addition to the vertical axis there is a helical movement around the axis both in the form itself and in the “bark” pattern. Besides mimicking a natural form, the diagonal of the helix gives a sense of movement around the piece and up from the earth to the sky. I used several different rocks in building a single form, both to emphasize stone moving through space rather than mass, and to create a sense of rhythm. It also allows me to involve construction as well as carving in making the sculpture.

I like to use several finishes to give visual variety to a work. To imply that the “tree” arises from the natural world I left the original texture of the base stone to contrast with the worked surfaces of the main sculpture. Pitched and bushed surfaces indicate stylized bark while the polished ends of the branches focus attention where the tree contacts the surrounding space.

In ‘Twisted Stele’ the helix dominates the form much more than in ‘Snag’. Again I use a variety of finishes: the original patina of the base section left to connect it to the earth, bushing on the transition from base to the helix and the outer edges of the helix, polish on the outer edges of the faces, and broken saw cuts meeting in the middle. The broken saw cuts have several functions: they activate what would be more uniform flat surfaces, they act in opposition to the upward flow of the helix, thus drawing the eye in toward the center of the sculpture, and they introduce the element of internal space into the work. This internal space visually connects the outside space to the interior. The delicacy of the connecting fragments gives a feeling of inner fragility in contrast to the outer strength.

‘Home’ is an example of a form dictated in large part by its concept. It portrays a section through the earth at the location of the Stillaguamish River valley where I live. Here I finally managed to do a vertical without a helical twist. However, the bend of the column creates a similar diagonal that adds to the feeling of upward movement as does the slight widening from bottom to top. The tension between the initial figurative aspect of the column and the miniature landscape it supports is intended as a “hook” to engage the passersby.

The highly polished topography plays off the rustic patina of the original basalt skin. This contrast serves to focus attention on the top which otherwise would appear truncated and create a sudden stop to eye movement. The reflective surface means viewers can see themselves as part of the sculpture.

The vertical scale of the valley shrinks as it moves up from the “river” to give more of a continuous flow from the valleys to the peaks. The rivers are marked by flaming with an oxyacetylene torch to give a vague, feathery appearance and then detailed with a point to give a white tool-mark contrast to the polished surface and natural weathered outside. A single dot shows location of my actual home. These details create a focal point that is important to the narrative of the work.

This discussion has touched on a particular set of ideas that appears in much of my work. Others that involve different design questions, or different permutations, could have been chosen; perhaps in another article.

A London Carver's Musing: Working with Stone - Jam/Feb 2004

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Created: Friday, 02 January 2004 06:44

Emily Young has emerged as one of Britain’s leading stone sculptors in the last decade. Working with a wide variety of colorful stones, most of them from the UK’s landscapes rather than quarries, she usually carves warriors and angels’ heads and torsos. What especially distinguishes her typical piece, however, is her talent for sliding gracefully from a classical, highly-polished form to the weathered stone from which she carved it. To traditionalists, her work often seems unfinished; but to a growing number of critics, exhibitors, and collectors, it combines a refreshing reverence not only for the human form but also for nature’s carving of the Earth’s bones. Born in London in 1951, Young has lived in Wiltshire, Rome, New York, and California. She was a muralist and painter prior to taking up sculpting in 1985. Her aphorisms in the ensuing piece come, with permission, from her rich webpage:www.emilyyoung.com.

Karl Hufbauer

A piece of stone, a hundred million years old, worked now, could still be here in another hundred million. Who would see it? What would they see?

The stone is hard. It takes diamonds to cut. I can hurl myself at a piece of stone, full strength with hammer and chisel and nothing happens. I do that a few times, and it will accept a small mark. It’s strong, it’s wild, it’s ancient and it has a cold dark heart. It is silent.

The stones exist in an utterly different way to us, slow, silent, and long-lived. And yet, they seem kinds of ancestors to me. They were here before and will be after us. They are made of particles that were born in starbursts, in galactic winds, in that first big bang. They participated more closely in that first singularity. There’s a poetry in them, in their impossibly long slow dance. They show their history, and thereby mine, and the earth’s and the universe’s.

Some stones ring or sing when I knock them with the right thing. The sound they make will tell if the stone is sound, solid, flaw-free, good to work, a quality that can be completely musical.

The exterior of a piece of stone is often a disguise: old, dull, weathered, but after a few hours of polishing, its surface shifts and reveals an extraordinary creation of colours, whirls, stripes, dots - configurations of inhuman complexity and beauty.

Certain stones, when I break them open, give off a quick flash of stink, of sulphur, or petrol, or the ocean, (seaweed? old fish?). I know as I fill my head with the brief whiff of breath that the smell was sealed away two hundred million years ago? four hundred million years ago? six hundred million years ago?

Sometimes I polish a piece of stone and it gradually shows a semblance of water, or the night sky, or flames, or honeycomb, or feathers, or snakeskin, or clouds, or melting ice cream and I am delighted and surprised.

In the past, stone was used to tell stories, to let people know Gods and Queens and Princes, athletes and victors, the famous and the glorious, the vanquished and the foes. Stone was the best material to serve man’s grandest ambitions. I can’t really do that. I don’t want to make the stone my servant: a bigger wilder story is told by the stone itself, of the earth, and the universe. Perhaps I use the human form to let the people see the stone, so it can tell its story, which is part of my story, our story.

The word Angel from the Sanskrit ANJIRAS, means messenger from the gods to man. It seems to me that stones are also messengers from the gods. They are carrying secrets from our past, our creator. The geologists found a better story to explain our origins than the fabulous mix of myth, poetry, and history told in Genesis. The stones whisper to us about things older than we can conceive, gloriously mysterious, yet they are hard, and real; I can touch them with my hands, look into them with a microscope. Here, now, I make my marks, and then they carry on with their journey. Some of these stones are possibly over a billion years old, and it is also possible that they could last into the future for another billion, becoming then a messenger from us as well.

The looks on the faces of the angels are not planned as such, they arrive and surprise me often with their softness and sadness, and strength and calm. But like all good angels, they have a certain graveness, an objectivity, a touch of the infinite, and a certain compassion.

I have a sense of shame for our culture; I wonder if anyone were to find these pieces at some point in the future whether they might get a sense of our good will towards each other and our planet. There’s a hint, a clue for the creatures of the future, that some of us would have liked things to be different.

One of the things that seems important is that whoever sees these angels and warriors and torsos, from whatever culture and from whatever (human) time, should find them readable, recognisable.