Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Two stone boats on two different coasts



Continuing on the theme of stone boats, I assembled this one, a small sailboat installation on the Mowat's lawn sometime ago near St Peter's Nova Scotia. It's made from four stones I found on their beach when we were visiting Farley and Caire in the summer of 2007. The crazy hull-shaped stone was the inspiration and impetus for doing a boat at all. Claire tells me it's still moored up there at their summer place out east.


Here's another boat made of two stones I found laying very close to each other, this time out on the west coast. I balanced them last year on a day off before doing a dry stone workshop out in Victoria BC. 

Again finding the stone with a hull shape gave me the idea. 

It's not just people, or books, or all that active input we get from all around us or surfing the internet. Sometimes it's just ordinary inactive stones just lying around that give us ideas. 

I wonder about stones like these, continuing on one course, which involves mostly a lot of waiting, and then rather strangely, in the eventual unfolding of time, someone comes along and in a kind of destined way, finds them and fits them together in a new shape (it doesn't have to be a boat) and so sets them on a new course. In a way, isn't that exactly what we wallers do every time we fit courses of stones in a wall ?