Beginning to Explore Granite Carving.

Recently I have begun to explore granite carving, joining a granite carving workshop to learn and begin to develop the unique skills of this type of stone carving. Granite, as opposed to Portland Limestone that I have previously carved, has a much greater tie to Cornwall and the locality and place of where I live and create work as well as being much more readily available.

Carving Granite, naturally, is an even slower process to carving Limestone. I have previously written about enjoying the mindful, gradual process of completing my Limestone sculpture and the hardness of granite furthers this. This along with my lack of experience with the material increases the focus required to carve. The heavier tools, more resistant stone and this greater focus makes for a more intense experience and impact on the body. As a beginner to the technique, I am carving in shorter bursts than an experienced granite sculptor – the tools are heavier, the stone requires more impact to remove material and missing the chisel and bashing your finger hurts much more. I can feel myself get into more of a rhythm with granite. Perhaps that is the intensity of the carving or perhaps it is a deeper connection to a stone that has such a local cultural significance. The body feels more tied to the land through producing sculpture with this process; the ache in the arms the following day, the cut and bruised hands, the itch to get back into that specific rhythm again before the following weeks’ session.

In the granite I am, again, carving out a void; a negative space sculpture. Though after just two sessions’ progress visually the void is not very deep, it feels much more potent and full than the void I carved out of the Portland Limestone. More energy has gone into the process of removing matter, more blood, more sweat and more force, and that energy is gradually filling out the space, permeating down into the material. To represent this energy, once finished I will physically fill this void with documents of the process of the carving, embodiments of the energy that went in to the creation of this void. I plan to fill the completed voidal sculpture with substance that evokes the solid mass of stone and its implications on the body. I plan to write prose and poetry describing my experience of carving the piece and of the land it is tied to, the rock’s history – the rawness of the surfaces within the void having been exposed to the world for the first time in millions of years. I will stuff the void with this writing, making it unreadable, perhaps even stretching this further to translating the text into Morse Code – the ‘dots’ echoing the sounds of the hammer and chisel and the silences representing a filling of the void, a palpable substance to the negative space. I will also fill the void with documents of the quarry, documents of the impact of the carving on my body (photographic prints of my hands post-carving etc.) and the energy that I have channelled into the negative space where solid rock once was.

This method of representing an intangible energy as something tangible differs from that which I used with my limestone carving, where I placed a pot of the limestone dust that had been excavated from the block next to the voidal sculpture. This is mainly due to the fact that it is very difficult to collect the granite fragments that are carved out of the block due to the violence of the carving method itself compared to limestone carving. However this does provide an opportunity to fill the void with a more personal, raw document of the process, when compared to the ‘factual’ representation of the negative space in the literal, excavated material.