Carving Stone, a Quarry Visit and an ‘Accidental Woodcut’

Stone itself as a material has long been the tie between my work and the land that I work with and in, making working directly with stone as a sculptural material a logical next step in my practice. Due to availability I began carving into a piece of Portland Limestone, basing the sculpture off a sketch I completed of the negative space between two rocks – the sculpture itself would be a study of negative space, hence the choice of drawing to base it upon.

As I chiselled away at the block of stone it began to appear almost as a scale model of a quarry, giving the work a further link to the landscape, especially to negative spaces in the landscape that I have been particularly focused on recently. This tied my practical work to my writing and research in another way; I have recently analysed Barbara Hepworth’s Landscape Sculpture (1944) as a minimal, abstract representation of the post industrial quarried landscape, in some ways my own carving was influenced by this.

To realise these analysis’ further and to bring a notion of field research to my practice, I visited Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry in Penryn, where I took short video clips of sounds (explanations of processes by the quarrymen, sounds of running water, sounds of machinery) and visuals of the working quarry, sketched, and collected some samples of granite and wood. I also wrote a small piece detailing my own experience of standing within the pit at the quarry:

12th October 2019, Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry:

The pit was oddly pensive and still. There was a feeling of ‘almost-silence’. Even though the saws and grinders could clearly be heard in the distance, when the grinder paused and just the white-noise humming of the large saw was left, a feeling of quiet hung in the air. It was a thick sort of pseudo stillness, weighted and dense, like matter, almost. Despite it not even being completely silent in the quarry, the lack of (perhaps anticipated) chaos and commotion on a quiet, weekend day made some areas feel rather abandoned, which was strangely paradoxical to the distant sound of the machinery – not usually something to be found ‘still’ or ‘pensive’.

I felt the weightedness of the stillness of abandonment and the displacement of mass, the tension and ’ghost reverberations’ of dormant sound, amplified by the physical documents of geological time – the rock strata and formations – literally surrounding the pit. The build-up of years of industrial and, more so, geological activity was tangible within the space, almost as if I was within the earth – I sort of was. Standing metres below the fields and roads surrounding the quarry gave a very different perspective of the landscape than when stood on the surface, on the flat, solid ground by the sheds and mason’s workshops, simply looking across the surrounding countryside.

At the quarry, granite is supported by pieces of wood when it is being sawn into smaller pieces, causing these pieces of wood to become scarred with criss-crossing saw marks which litter the site after they’ve been used. I took a small piece of this scarred wood, a little larger than A4 in size, back to my studio as an ‘accidental sculpture’, a by-product of the quarrying process, a readymade woodblock, with the intention of making a print of its surface textures.

The result of printing this piece of wood was almost barcode-like, the cropped squares of linear wood grain pattern showing up on the paper, cut up by the white, ‘negative space’ of the saw marks. Again like with my other woodcuts, I preferred the woodblock itself over the printed pieces – perhaps a reflection on my sculptural preferences.

What drew me to this off cut piece of wood was its accidental sculpture. The saw marks made the block of wood into a sculptural form, echoing the quarry itself; a landscape that has become a negative space sculpture due to the quarrying for granite, not for aesthetic purposes, though it has now become a huge sculptural form after years of excavation.