Pumpkin Seed Winter Garden (what I did on my winter vacation)

There’s a certain satisfaction in doing something yourself that can’t be achieved in any other way. It’s not that other satisfactions have less strength or value, they’re just different. Each and every stone laid in the creation of the Pumpkin Seed garden enclosure passed through my hands. I say that with pride but also in the full knowledge that a team of wallers under my direction and following my design could have built the structure to a high standard without my lifting a finger. So, for me, it’s not the final result that distinguishes the piece, it’s the process I went through in the past few months to get it there. The daily figuring-out of what needs to happen next and how to get it done under the prevailing field conditions is what the Seed is made of in my mind’s eye.

Stone Clouds Forming

Every year, the plow turns up more stones in Ken Leach’s cornfield. It appears they’ve floated up through the rich Mettawee Valley soil from below the surface when in fact they’ve floated down upon the face of the earth from far above. There were once great clouds of ice between earth and sky. Ken’s stones were tucked into mile-high blankets of frozen water vapor. They’d been plucked from the even taller mountains that used to reign here, and carried in alluvial fans out across glaciers that were thousands of years in the making and thousands of years in the melting. When the land that is now a Vermont Land Trust protected property said goodbye to its last glacier, twelve thousand years ago, all the sediment and rock that was riding its coattails settled to the ground, creating the dark soil that farmers like for growing corn, plus, an unwelcome bounty of stones.

Piling Pumpkins

There are steps along the way to completing a project that deserve celebration. Yesterday the north wall of the “pumpkin seed” garden fence was topped out at its eight foot height. While clambering around on ladders and icy boulders is exhilarating in its own way, I’m glad to be finished with this stage of the work. Left to do on the fence is the final course of coping stones and filling in the break in the wall line that’s been used for loader access to the garden’s interior.

Diamond Mines

My land art piece, Diamond Mines, is now in a happy marriage with Glenmorangie distillery. The Diamond Mines from 2011, with photo by Peter Mauss/ESTO, has been licensed for a Glenmorangie Signet print advertising campaign. See below for the TICKON Sculpture Park Catalog text.

Art, Environmental Art, SculptureDan SnowJanuary 12, 2015dan snow, diamond mines, esto, featured, peter mauss, tickon sculpture park

A Year in Stone

Once again, dry stone construction has taken me around the seasons. Work that employed the simplest of means culminated in a complexity of projects and events. There were presentations, workshops, consultations and proposals. There were utilitarian constructions, memorials and art installations. There was even a grant awarded and inclusion in a magazine article and a book. The year in stone took me around New England, to other countries and back in time.

Memory Stones

As a worker in stone I’m sometimes asked to create funerary monuments. Art making in a cemetery is necessarily a delicate operation. I want the monument design and installation to be respectful of its setting, while at the same time, I want to be true to my mission as an artist. A cemetery already has a very strong presence of place. An attempt to make something radically different from what’s come before would be working against the grain of time.

StoneDan SnowDecember 20, 2014featured, memorial, memorial stones, memory stones, monument, skinner memorial, stones

The Growing Pumpkin Seed

Temperatures in the 20’s F, steady 10 mph winds gusting to 25. Stones fastening themselves to the surface of the ground with frost. Time to close down walling activities for the year, right? Wrong. The wind chill was definitely bracing on the work-site hilltop this week but building went on apace. In fact, some things got easier as a result of the cold. No more wet gloves or bucket loader-eating mud holes. Underfoot turned to hard, no-slip surfaces, bringing welcome stability for plucking and plopping stone.

Dry Stone, Dry Stone Walling, Project, StoneDan SnowNovember 22, 2014dry stone, dry stone walling, featured, pumpkin seed, stone

Pumpkin Seed

The seed shape is fructuous. Its asymmetricality suggests continued growth and development. The entry point of the garden, the pinched end of the seed, expresses the concept of compression used by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his design of foyers. His idea was to constrain the vestibule area to hasten movement toward the voluminous inner space. Compression springs expansion. The sense of garden bountiful is increased by passing through a narrow portal.

Place or Space

This week celebrates the publication by Aalto University of a ground-breaking Environmental Art book. Edited by my friend and comrade in art, Markku Hakuri, Place or Space (Paikka vai tila) tells the story of places, spaces and situations that the contributing writers encounter when reflecting on the potential of art as a provider of social commentary, and as a shaper or a challenger of the visual appearance of our environment.

Art, Books, Environmental ArtDan SnowNovember 3, 2014art, books, environmental art, featured, finland, markku hakuri, nature, place or space, teaching

Cadboll Stone

While visiting Scotland earlier this month I received a crash course in Pictish stone carving. The Picts lived north of what is now Edinburgh from the 1st to 3rd century AD. Little is known about them other than what can be deciphered from the system of symbols found carved on stones and engraved on metalwork. Nearly 200 stones survive, including the Hilton of Cadboll Stone that now resides in the National Museum of Scotland. After viewing the original Cadboll stone I met sculptor Barry Grove who was commissioned to carve a new stone, sited at the Cadboll Stone’s place of origin outside the royal burgh of Tain, just north of Inverness.

Building the Ruminator

In the beginning the idea was to make it a solitary object out in the field north of the garden. I had visions of a compost carousel with four pie-shaped stalls. Then it was a long barrow-shaped affair with tractor ramps to the top of the bins. I knew little about composting but I was having lots of fun with modeling clay imagining the construction of a dry stone Ruminator. Scale model making is an enjoyable pursuit that helps develop spatial acuity. The process of shaping clay is slow enough for deliberation to take place and fast enough for a form to observably emerge. Results unfold in an organic fashion.

Swept up in Stone

The autumn 2014 issue of Garden Design magazine is a beauty to behold. In its newly re-conceived subscription-only, advertisement-free format, the magazine is like a coffee table book with sumptuous photographs on every page. My thanks go out to the Garden Design staff for including my work alongside that of many talented artisans, to Lindsey for a clear and compelling article, and to Gemma and Andy for the truly splendid photography.

A Week with Eblacker & Stone

Between two wildflower meadows, in a glade of hardwoods, Chuck has designed a personal park for his clients. Crescent shaped seating walls will cascade toward a circular folly. The turret-like construction will have a doorway and windows framed in recycled architectural stone. The bulk of the building will be realized in reused, sandstone wall stone and granite boulders found on site.

Woodland Farms Garden Conservancy Open Days

The prospect was uninviting. Could I build a stone disguise for an electrical transformer? The call came at a busy time late in the last century. I advised the caller to check back again in a year. One year later, to the day, I received a second call from Rick and Susan Richter. The request for a short wall around the transformer was still on the table but they had a few other items they were interested in having me build for them on their Springfield, Vermont property. A dry stone fence around the fruit and vegetable garden was now at the top of their to-do list. Thus began my ten year working relationship, and continuing friendship, with Susan and Rick.

Vermont Arts Council Award

Fifty years ago I won a blue ribbon in the Brattleboro Sidewalk Art Show. Thirty years ago I won a National Endowment for the Arts award for designing a local amphitheatre. This week I received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Some might say, the awards in my artistic career have been few and far between. I believe their rarity makes them all the more precious. Being recognized by my beloved green mountain state is especially dear.

English Harbour Arts Centre Stone Art Workshop

The English Harbour fog machine has been churning out invisibility for a solid 24 hours. Before I arrived here a week ago the southwest wind that funnels moisture off Trinity Bay into the land bowl above the harbor had kept the village cloaked in a cotton wool shroud for fourteen days. Fortunately, the recently concluded environmental art workshop maintained blue skies above for each and every one of its five days. There were long-distance views in every direction from the headlands where the six participants worked on their dry stone installation.

Woody Point Workshop

Last evening the atmosphere softened to dusty rose across the far horizon. An osprey wheeled its way around the shoreline heading across Green Bay toward an incandescent object rising from the shimmering surface of the sea. Two hours earlier, I was at Ken Tuach’s stone yard wrapping up a day of DSWA examination. E and I then made a mad dash from western Newfoundland to the Baie Verte Peninsula just in time to glimpse the majestic iceberg across the water before the darkness descended.

Columbarium Completed

Two month ago I laid the first stone for the new Columbarium at Center Cemetery in Norfolk, Connecticut. Since then I’ve been working long hours, four or five days a week shifting, lifting and setting 100 tons of stone.

Materials used in the construction were sourced from five locations. Besides 1 ½” crushed stone for the base, I used tailings from a Vermont slate quarry for shim stock, 3”-5” local riprap for hearting, split-face stone from Quimby Mountain Quarry, field stone from on-site, and stone gathered from a natural rock slide in Vermont for wall face and top stones. To keep the work flowing smoothly it helped to have a full complement of shapes and sizes at every phase of the construction.