Snow Fence

The past few weeks I’ve tossed my lot in making changes on a New Hampshire hilltop. It wasn’t the first time a collection of stones there was strung across the high mowing. Someone came in the 19th century and flung up a wall, divining meaning from the random arrangement of stones as they fell into place. And then it was my turn to interpret the stones. The old, sunken wall line coughed up bucketful after excavator bucketful of fieldstone. After spreading the stones out on the frozen ground so I could get a good look at the variety of shapes and sizes, I chose a fair form for re-assemblage.

Dry Stone Walling, StoneDan SnowMarch 11, 2016dan snow, dry stone walling, featured, field wall, lace wall, snow fence, stone

The Shadow Hill Concept

With a strong northwesterly wind whipping “snownados” up from the frosty ground outside, I’m in the studio devising hypotheticals for an unfrozen future. There’s time enough for a wonderland of “what ifs” to decorate the internal landscape when the porch thermometer reads 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Most are just a smokeless pipe dream, but sometimes an idea takes hold and won’t let go until it attains some semblance of reality. Nothing is real to me unless it achieves three-dimensionality. Even at ¼”-1’ scale, a concept materialized in modeling clay is enough to make me a believer.

Montshire Museum Raindrops

A raindrop splashing on still water ripples the surface with expanding wave rings that grow in number as they diminish in height. From the purity of the physics involved comes a simple beauty. Liquid in motion is mesmerizing to watch because it’s constantly changing while remaining the same. For the upcoming project at Montshire Museum I will petrify an instant in the life of two raindrops.

Stone Memorial Bench

There’s much to be considered in the process of producing of a stone memorial. Even something as simple as a bench requires discussion about setting, size, shape, materials, and the wording, layout and carving of a dedication. Often there are many family members and friends involved in the choices to be made. My task as a memorial designer/builder/installer is to gather individually held emotions and transform them into a collective expression. Hopefully, everyone will recognize something of their personal feelings reflected in the finished work.

Project, StoneDan SnowDecember 19, 2015bench, featured, memorial, memorial bench, memorial stones, stone, stone memorial bench

Cairn With a Twist

As solid as land art is, it’s capable of absorbing an unlimited amount of meaning. Each viewer brings a unique perspective and adds a bit of their own story to the experience of the work. The memory of the work that they go away with is a blend of what they brought and what they discovered while there. The meaning of the work is modified by every viewer. Over time, with many viewings, that adds up to a hefty load of ephemeral meanings, none of which physically impact the land art. It stays the same as its meaning changes.

Rock Springs Revisited

After decades of assessing the attributes of inanimate objects in a direct and uncompromising way, I find myself in terrain where taking that path of least resistance only leads down a slippery slope to nowhere special. From a distance, the long way around appears to be inefficient and wasteful, but once the trip begins, the side tracks and stops along the way become the definition of the journey. The people met, the conversations had, the agreements made, are memorialized in the installation that’s left behind. They become the substance, if not the point, of the project. The public work now belongs to those who meander by, and will, I hope, become their memory touchstone.

Gravitational Pull and Push

Walling puts stone in relationship to gravity as much, or perhaps more, than it puts stone in relationship to stone. In walling, stone is the language through which we speak to gravity. Students open a dialogue with gravity when they place a stone. With time and practice they begin to direct that conversation.

Artist Statement Stone Clouds

Stone Clouds is a tribute to the sustainable agriculture practiced by generations of Mettawee Valley farmers who've picked tons of stones from their fields, all by hand.

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.

Stone Clouds Materialized

The shape of a project is pointy at opposite ends and lumpy in the middle. The spark that starts things off may be as quick and simple as seeing a cornstalk-stubbled field sprinkled with the till of a bygone glacier, and thinking, “What would it take to put those stones back up into the sky from whence they fell?” In between that thought and standing under Stone Clouds at Shelburne Museum yesterday was a year-long ride’s worth of lumps and bumps. The unknown is an uneven landscape. Highs are best employed to gain speed for the roll up out of the lows ahead. Uncertainty provides its own propulsion.

Rock Springs

Like other environmental art works I’ve done, Rock Springs is in, of and for its home place. The 32’x44’x5’ sculpture invites exploration. The interwoven coils of dry stone walls rise and fall underfoot as they’re traversed. Broad top stones elevate viewers above deep fissures separating the walls. Hand trimmed and set sandstone blocks comprise the double-faced walls, with architectural remnants repurposed for top stones.

Amphitheater Studies

Amphitheaters have been an interest of mine since the early 1980’s when I applied for and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study them. Soon after, I was commissioned to build amphitheater-like seating behind the home plate backstop of our local softball field. The granite terraces have become a well used addition to the summer scene in Brattleboro, Vermont. Since then, I’ve been able to design and build lots of stone seating arrangements but nothing quite like a classic, half-shell amphitheater of old, until now.

Stone Clouds

“Permanent” is one adjective I associate with my dry stone constructions. When I was asked to make a temporary installation on the grounds of the Shelburne Museum for the upcoming “Eyes on the Land” exhibition, some very different affiliations sprang to mind. And so, as I became acquainted with the Vermont Land Trust properties in the Mettawee Valley that I was partnered with for the show, I sought out examples of land formation and land use that might be described as “short term”.

Lilyfield 2

The Pictish symbol for time depicts intertwined spirals, spooling outward in every direction from a centerpoint. They saw their movement through time as a dance with the past, in the present, with a nod to the future. For them, where each step is experienced looks and feels different from every other, but all are part of the same expanding destiny.

Tarbat Peninsula

Unlike the rugged upland landscape typically associated with the Highlands, the Tarbat is a low-lying peninsula of rolling ground that was, until recently by geologic time, a sandy sea bed. The rich dark soil supports extensive sheep pasturing, plus, oilseed rape, potato and barley production. Fields are outlined in dry stone walls (dry stane dykes) constructed from sandstone blocks lifted from the ancient bedrock found just under the soil in many parts of the Tarbat.

Lilyfield

The whorling pattern of convoluted forms in the signet carved on the Cadboll Stone has a deep history. Before the pattern became emblematic of Picts culture, the earlier Celts employed a similar iconography in what is understood to be their graphic representation of time. If I think of the signet in terms of time, I see that for the Picts time was not linear. Time pulsed in a rhythm. Time unfolded and turned back on itself. The Cadboll signet lays out all of time’s manifestations in one picture. The concealed is present with the revealed.

Art, Stone, TravelDan SnowMay 10, 2015cadboll stone, celts, featured, pictish stone carving, picts, stone carving

Land Art for the Moment

The notion that great things come from small beginnings is canonized in the proverb; “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow”. And so it was with Pumpkin Seed, the dry stone garden enclosure that grew on a windy knoll in southern New Hampshire last winter. What started as a concept in clay, the size of my hand, turned into a ring of stone too high for me to see over.

Bench Season

It’s a good time of year to tackle the smaller projects. Trenching by hand isn’t so bad if the shovel work can get done in the cool of the morning. A bench can be assembled with a minimum of loader travel across a spongy lawn. This month I’ve realized two designs. Both are basic, three-stone constructions but with personalities all their own. One relies on interlocking opposites, while the other counts on monolithic mass, to stand and stay put.

Dry Stone Walling, Nature, StoneDan SnowApril 19, 2015dry stone walling, featured, maple syrup, mud season, nature, stone, vermont

Newfoundland: Not Just About “The Rock”

Newfoundland’s well deserved nickname is “The Rock.” You can’t go anywhere on the island without running into some new geologic wonder to explore. An ample supply of loose building stone is what first drew me to Canada’s easternmost province but in the five, annual pilgrimages I’ve made to Newfoundland since 2010 I’ve discovered that there’s much more going on there.