Cope Aesthetic

A contractor asked me to do a proper dry stone wall, using stone from a local quarry, in front of a house that he had just finished building, for a client up near Meaford Ontario.

 

I met with him, decided where it would go, we agreed on a price and I built the wall. For the several weeks, I think it took me to build it, I never met the lady who owned the house. 

About a week later I got the call from the contractor. He told me the lady had moved in and had seen the wall. 

I asked him what she thought of her wall. 

"Actually," he said " she got quite emotional. She was crying."

"Oh wow" I said, "I'm glad to hear she liked it."

"No, no. She hated it. She said, all the upright stones on the top of the wall made it look like a prison. She wants you to come back and take them all off. "

I couldn't believe it.

I came back and took them off, and coped the wall with dull flat stones.

 

Driveby Compliments

When I was just finishing up this new dry stone wall entrance gate we built last year, I was delighted to be approached by a lovely young lady, who had pulled up behind my truck and began to eagerly tell me how wonderful the wall looked .

I commended her on her good taste and began to tell her some of the more interesting aspects of the project. I  then asked if she might like to see the wall from the estate side too? She thanked me and said " I would, but actually, I’m the gardener here, and I need to get by your truck!"   

 

Balancing the Kapla-Sphere.

There is a video of me on Instagram with a sphere I made for my granddaughter, out of Kapla blocks. It shows me lifting it up on to a tower of blocks, while she watches excitedly . Apparently, it attracted a lot of attention. (Eighty-one thousand views so far, after having posted it only three days ago.) I was, of course, delighted to see all the activity and read the many comments. Some of them very amusing. 

The video seems to very effectively capture the tension of trying to build something that could fall down at any moment. It reminded me of watching Andy Goldsworthy building his fragile installations in the video Rivers and Tides.

Anyway, as you can see above, in the clips from a that event, I lifted it successfully. 

I began to think of how similar the activity of stone balancing is to balancing wooden spheres.

I realized that all that excitement could now be brought indoors, and all kinds of safer balancing can be done on the living room coffee table!

So here's the thing, I'm already thinking of all the wooden block 'rock shapes' that are crying out to be 'balanced', starting of course with more spheres and then moving on to wooden cubes, on their edge, and even more challenging irregular shapes.

Maybe it will become a trend and go viral, reaching thousands of new followers.  Ha.

Our Stoney Shelter

Stone will always be our shelter. It protects us from all the other elements. It is the embodiment  the archetype of all matter. Its mass has the structural strength to stand up to the very gravity that pulls all things down. No sunscreen, no clothing, no shield, no barrier, no other material, no other manmade substance, can withstand the seemingly constant onslaught of deception, or the hopelessness of unreality, or the corruption of power, like real stone. Most things can be fake, but not stone.

 

Connecting the stones

Breaching at an angle towards the hedgerow,  this VW bug size specimen , this iceberg of a boulder , with its exposed surface , scarred with years of having been battered by farm implements being dragged over it, is waiting .  Just waiting 

 

Most farmers hate stones.  And the  stones? I suspect they don’t hate farmers. Maybe they even forgive all the smashing and crunching and burying , and waiting.

Big boulders that are mostly hidden beneath the surface are difficult to remove . This boulder, would like to join its friends, the ones in the hedge row over there . This fellow has been many years out in the field waiting to be relocated . Would  he be lonely? Stones seem to like to be together. 

Farmers do their part. For years and years, stones from the fields are all collected and stacked at the perimeters. The long stony strands along the fence lines are creating a kind of gossamer (albeit hefty) interdependent network of fauna and fieldstone. Not unlike mushrooms. Fields, continue to be cleared from stones, but become more and more surrounded by them. Eventually the fields form a kind of cellular pattern that can be seen from the sky.  The stones are connecting the lots. The landscape is bubblingly alive .

 

Dry Stone Waterfall

Back in June of 2016 we sent a grant proposal to the Canada Council detailing a unique land installation in Fenelon Falls on an island in the Trent-Severn Waterway. The project was initiated by a handful of enthusiastic townspeople who were actively involved in finding a solution, that would not just deal with the deteriorating cliff face on the south side of the island, but also be an aesthetic stone wall structure that the public could enjoy seeing, rather than having it continue to be a fenced off ‘area.

From the bridge the cliff face needing 'shoring up can be partially seen between the trees.

A possible rock face repair, merely shoring up the steep hill with armour stone, was one possible idea but the individuals  involved in town planning looked to find a better solution. The dry stone design that I proposed , along with several renderings of what it would look like, was accepted by everyone involved, including a representative of the Trent Canal authority and so began plans to finance the project

A formal request for a Canada Council grant was drafted and submitted, specifying a budget that was not excessive, and presented a thorough description of the work involved in not only structurally rebuilding the crumbling section of the island but also implementing an artistic ‘waterfall’ stone installation into the design.

 I had a lot of help with the wording of the grant document, for which I was very thankful. It included  the bios of several skilled dry stone wallers who would be working on the project with me, and a detailing of the proposed two-month schedule for completion of the project .

Unfortunately we did not get the grant.  

I include here some of the first renderings of what is essentially a conceptual art project, which also included the structural remediating of a low terraced outcropping. The idea was to use natural stone to look like a naturally occurring terraces of exposed rock face, through which, or over which, a small dry river creek, or ‘geological vein’ of different material would, by having stones fitted at right angles to the rest of the terraced stonework, give the suggestion of cascading water. To give a further appearance of water going over the terraces , boulders woulf be tastefully placed to look as natural as possible.