Stone Eye Guiding Grid

Despite temperatures in the 20’s Fahrenheit and a steady north wind, progress continued this week on the stone eye sculpture. The guide frame and 6” grid are in place, waiting now for a day warm enough to allow bare fingers to function properly for hanging the lines and weights that will establish the ‘points in space’ needed to begin the stone construction.

Thanks to Jamie for traveling from Lincoln, VT to help erect the frame. The area we’re working in is quite remote, evidenced by what we witnessed Monday morning; a coyote following a small herd of whitetail deer across a field, and into the woods, near the building site.

© All rights reserved Dan Snow In the Company of Stone

The Stone Trust: Up and Running

While wallers in east-central USA have had the excellent Dry Stone Conservancy as a beacon for the craft for many years, stone workers in the northeast have had to go it on their own. Until now. After only one year in existence, The Stone Trust has become an important regional resource for all things dry stone.

The Vermont sanctioned, not-for-profit, organization has already established an indoor centre for training and testing. It has hosted an instructor’s course with the result that there are eleven new DSWA (Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain) certificated instructors in the US and Canada. This past year, outdoor workshops offered one and two-day courses to a total of 39 participants who rebuilt 60 metres of historic fence. And the test days saw 15 candidates trying for Level 1, 2, and 3 certificates. Workshops in 2011 were instructed by Jared Flynn, Andrew Pighills, Dave Goulder and Dan Snow. Examiners included Michael Weitzner, Dave and Dan.

Along with the activities at the centre, outreach included the creation of web and social media sites, DSWA books and videos being placed in public libraries, and presentations offered to touring groups. The Stone Trust even became a corporate member of the DSWA!

The Stone Trust’s mission is to promote and advance the art and craft of dry stone walling. By all indications it is well on its way to doing just that. As a director on the board of The Stone Trust, I want to welcome all wallers, dykers and dry stone enthusiasts to the centre. Please join us in making The Stone Trust’s second year even more lively than the first.

© All rights reserved Dan Snow In the Company of Stone

Stone Eye Sculpture Site Preparations

In their later years, my parents enjoyed belonging to Vermont’s “251 Club.” Members travel around the state visiting all 251 towns, checking them off a list, just for fun. Maybe someday I’ll join, too, making my personal quest to see all of Vermont in a more organized way. For now, I’m satisfied to explore different townships through my work.

Over the past few days I assembled the materials for a sculpture installation in Morrisville, VT. I checked out marble blocks in Rutland, bought building stone from a quarry in Plainfield and lumber from a mill in North Hyde Park.

On site in Morrisville, I outlined the piece with sticks and ribbon to get a sense of its presence on the land, began excavation and finished the foundation work. The stonework will rest on a 3’ deep base of crushed stone. When completed, the sculpture will enclose two burial plots. The addition of a sand-filled,wood coffer will allow the second grave to be easily hand-dug at a future date.

Thanks to Tim Stone for trucking and to Buckwheat, Tom, Brian and Larry of Green Mountain Landscaping for their fine work preparing the site. 

© All rights reserved Dan Snow In the Company of Stone

A Stone Eye

A trip to Plainfield, Vermont in the F450 last week netted a dump load of wall stone from Mitchell’s Quarry. The quarry’s bedrock is a layered mix of quartzite, a granular metamorphic rock, and phyllite, a slaty rock with minute scales of mica.

Yesterday, I built some of the stone into a short wall to test its quality. The hope was that it would be good material to use in the stone-eye sculpture construction because the quarry is located a reasonable distance from the project site, and because the stone is generally planar. Since the construction will be vertically bedded walling, the stone needs to have flat surfaces for maximum contact. I must also be able to trim and shape its edges with a hammer. The test walling proved the stone acceptable in most aspects, but thicker pieces tended to fracture along cleavage planes when I struck an edge with multiple hammer blows.

Today I’m transferring information from 60 pages of data onto a master plan for the stone-eye construction. Corner points in a grid of 6” squares are given numerical values that correspond to their position on the surface of the sculpture. The 32’ diameter sculpture will require more than 3,000 points-in-space to guide the construction.

© All rights reserved Dan Snow In the Company of Stone

Points in Space

Every new idea leads to an adventure. In the past when I’ve wanted to record and transfer “points-in-space” from a clay model to a full scale construction I’ve made a grid-style guide frame and physically measured the distance from the frame to the surface of the model. To build the horse eye sculpture I will need thousands of measurements on a 6”x6” grid. My new idea was to find someone who could digitally scan the model for the measurements I would need.

Jim Greene, and his wife Jane, own JMR Systems in Derry, New Hampshire. I tracked them down through my connections in the model-making world. On Monday I took the clay model to them, and in a just a couple hours Jim was able to scan it using a Konica Minolta Range5 Non-contact Digitizer and give me a list of X,Y and Z coordinates that correspond to points on the surface of the sculpture.

Trying something different in my sculpture-creating process has taken me to a region of New Hampshire I haven’t visited before, introduced me to two very interesting people and given me an insight into a new technology.

© All rights reserved Dan Snow In the Company of Stone