Workshop walls minus the busy background

One of our students returned yesterday to show her family the walls she and the rest of the crew built during the two day valentine workshop last weekend in California.  Sadly they were already being dismantled to make more room in the warehouse.   I'm told they got rid of the walls completely by noon. 

So with valid justification and through the magic of Photoshop, I gladly got rid of the warehouse instead, and have posted the walls, in the four different styles we built them in, without any background! 

The Rhyolite Triangle

The three stages of the three sided three styled free styled dry stone wall workshop near San Francisco on Valentine's day weekend. 

With an Arch too !

Tons and tons of rhyolite Cold Water Canyon igneous rock quarried from near Mt Shasta California were used in this dry stone installation.

This was a temporary construction which was built it inside the stone shop. Yes, we were in the 'bay area' again.

* No wallers were hurt in this making of this project.

The lightness of Stones.

                          Magic Realism Art by Paul Bond | Abduzeedo Design Inspiration

Heavy Course Load

When I'm working with rocks and stones and listening carefully to the them, and really letting them teach me....that's the time I learn tons !

Heritage Award for Excellence

Amherst Island resident honoured with Heritage Trust Award

Dry Stone Festival

John Shaw-Rimmington

Andrea Cross with some of the young ‘wallers’ at the Dry Stone Festival on Amherst Island.

Kingston Heritage

By Mandy Marciniak 

News – Last September, a local festival worked to put Amherst Island on the map culturally and now its organizer is being recognized for her hard work. 

On Feb. 26, island resident and member of Dry Stone Canada, Andrea Cross, will receive the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation. The award is administered by the Ontario Heritage Trust and Cross is receiving it for her work on the Amherst Island Dry Stone Festival that was held last September.

“I didn’t even know I was being nominated, so it was a big surprise,” said Cross, who was nominated by Loyalist Township Deputy Mayor Ric Bresee. “I’m happy he didn’t tell me because I would have been so nervous.”

The award works to recognize a specific conservation activity or a project that is a contribution to natural or cultural heritage conservation. The project must be located in and benefit Ontario, and demonstrate leadership, commitment, creativity and a positive impact on the community.

“The event really worked to create new historic features on the island,” said Bresee. “It was a wonderful festival. I saw the amount of work Andrea was putting into it and wanted to recognize that.”

The focus of the Dry Stone Festival was to showcase the existing Irish dry stone walls on the island, learn how they were created and create new walls to add to the old. 

“We wanted to educate people about the importance of these structures and the significance of them,” said Cross. “It resulted in the legacy structures being built, but it also resulted in us documenting and creating a self-guided dry stone wall map and tour guide so that people who come to the island can experience these walls and read about them.”

The festival was held over a weekend in September and attracted a lot of attention from locals, people with Irish heritage and even wallers from Ireland. 

“We wanted to introduce Amherst Island and the dry stone walls to wallers from around the world so they could come and look at these historic walls and realize that their trade is something that is recognized as significant and important and celebrate the work that they do,” said Cross.

 The event also worked to teach younger generations about dry stone walls and even allowed them to build their own walls out of potatoes.

“It worked so well and we were able to build arches and walls out of these potatoes and then we donated them afterwards,” explained Cross.

The main accomplishment from the event was a Celtic Cross legacy structure with an ocular design. The wall has an opening built into it that allows a shaft of light from a setting sun to shine through onto another carved stone – an event that only happens at certain times of year.  

“It is really beautiful and I’ve had numerous people who attended contacting me to find out when the light will shine through next,” said Cross. “They want to come back to see the wall and really celebrate the cultural heritage of the island and Canada and that is what this was all about.”

Bresee is happy that Cross is being recognized for her hard work with the award and above all, he is happy that Loyalist Township is being recognized too.

“The award is well-earned and well-deserved,” said Bresee. “This is an opportunity for us to say thank you and for the entire province to say thank you to Andrea for what she has done. The island is in some ways an entity to itself and in other ways it is the heart of Loyalist Township and this just enhances that.”

Mandy Marciniak is a reporter for the Kingston Heritage and Frontenac Gazette. She can be reached at mmarciniak@metroland.com. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

http://www.kingstonregion.com/news-story/6273512-amherst-island-resident-honoured-with-heritage-trust-award/

Making the roof for the watch tower

Sean Smyth, Dave Claman and Royce Kelly have worked the last couple of weeks preparing the stone tiles to make the turret roof for the Irish watchtower here in California. 

Over 800 pieces of mica schist have been sawn in triangles and chipped to create a beveled edge on each stone. The stones will be dry laid in a cone shape, on the top of the tower. It will be ten feet tall and 12 feet in diameter.

You can see the cone shape beginning here in a test configuration they've built on the ground. 

The tiles are all built on this interlocked cribbing of corbelled mica schist slabs that will create a crude dome shape over the upper floor of the tower to support the stone roof tiles. 

We figure there will be about 25 tons of stone material all together. 

Putting our hands to the task.

"Before enlightenment, chop stones, carry hearting. 

After enlightenment, chop stones, carry hearting."

Any task can become more than a task. It can become a creative act.

It's the hands and their handiwork that attests to an enlightened mind. 

The stone waller's prayer

Lord, grant me the courage to accept the stones that I should not change the shape of, even though I can 

The humility to  'change' the stones which just might be 'improved' by me shaping them

 And the wisdom to know the difference.

Croc Balancing

Had another go at croc balancing yesterday.

They are not really heavy enough.

Work boots are better.

I'll have to get some.

陰と陽 In to yō

Still on the positive/negative theme from our Gualala workshop, and using dry laid stones again, I went down to Anchor Bay beach yesterday morning and produced this. I was quite happy with how it turned out. 

I like the idea of contouring an array of stones over a configuration of two or more balanced stones. 

Just need to come up with a name for this style of stone art.

Someone suggested the Japanese phrase  'In to yō'  陰と陽

Apparently it means Yang with Yin

Gapping

Repairing dry stone walls, like building them, is an ancient craft. The common name for it is gapping, and a lot of farmers in Britain who have walls around their fields usually know how to do it themselves. 

Gapping takes place between portions of dry stone wall that are still in good condition. You have to find enough stone to gap properly.  Hopefully it is all still there lying in the field beside the wall or down in the ditch after a car ran into it.

Yesterday we did more artistic gapping. We built between some of the huge cored beams of travertine that we added to the top of our Canadian wall this February. Royce Kelly from Arkansas helped us for a while, just for a break from sawing roof tiles all day, to be used on the Gualala watchtower. 

The holes left after coring the travertine beams are the remaining negative shapes after they've cut out the 24 inch high 'column' sections. They are 'throw aways' and yet they can be used quite effectively, as we have done here, to a create modern looking architectural cope detail along the top of the wall. All we had to do was gap them together.

He just wanted to enlarge the garage door...

That was one KEY keystone !

A fitting place to sit

Mark Ricard and John DiBona make sure the granite seating slabs go into place properly. There is lots of fitting still to be done. Measuring, scribing, re-lifting, dressing, repositioning, levelling, and shifting the slabs back together before it all looks right

The result looks predictably stunning. A garden bench supported by a radiating spectrum of soldier stones flanked by basalt boulders. A vertical keyboard of earthy coloured mica quartzite coaxed into a curve so that people can sit and face one another to converse.

A place to sit and enjoy the ferns and mighty redwoods.

An installation worthy of the fine reputation the Gualala Art Center has established over the 50 years it has been in operation here in the community.

A Twelve Ton Composition

We are still making beautiful music here at the Gualala Art Centre. This monochromatic photo shows me practicing doing a monochromatic scale on upright stones which form the base part of a long cadenza bench. 

Mark and I have been keying in bars of mica quartzite in a vertical staccato pattern before the second movement begins, which involves finely tuned academy black granite slabs (fabricated by John DiBona) being lowered into place as people watch from the picnic area. 

Seating will be limited for this performance which we expect to put on tomorrow around noon.

Thanks to Kat Gleason for the musical inspiration

Outdoing Themselves

Here's a shot of the dry stonework Nicholas Tompkins and his fantastic crew, and Kyle Schlagenhauf and his amazing crew, and an army of terrific volunteers built during this year's Stone Symposium.

Positive Front and Back

The stone feature we built at the Gualala Art Centre, during the Positive/Negative Conversation Workshop, turned out to have a great back side as well as an amazing front view.

This was very serendipitous as often the backsides of dry stone installations can look pretty boring.  

The setting, of course, makes everything 'pop' even more.

These past two weeks were great days of building in California and it was with an amazing bunch of people. The teamwork, the fun, the excitement, the conversation and yes the partying was all first rate. 

The stones had called us together again for another year of 'symposing' and we all fit so well.

Thanks to Nicholas, Zack, Amber, Kyle, Amanda, Shannon, Neil, Jane, Peter, David and so many generous people for organizing it.

Good good good Foundations

Every stone project should have a good stone foundation. Bill Hay of Bedrock provided the much needed grading and prep work and gravel base material for the large picnic area project we completed at Gualala last week with the 2016 symposium crew. 

Here he is with Harmony Susalla in front of the wall built by the students using fairly local Diablo basalt material

While much of the Stone Foundation crew has packed up and headed home now, the rest of us enjoyed pizza and a swim last night at the Hay's house near Point Arena, California.  

For dessert Bill's wife Karen set out a scrumptious Stone Foundation cake incorporating our famous logo.  

Thanks Bill and Karen 

And life flows on 'Within You Without You'

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away
We were talking about the love we all could share
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love
With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realise it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

George Harrison

We were talking about the space between us all.

Stones skillfully fitted together structurally, with nothing else keeping them in place, can create a kind of visual conversation. 

It is a conversation between positive and negative space.
And it is always interesting.

Walls having spaces in them that are too wide lose this give- and-take connection. The relationships, the comparisons are lost. There is little conversation. 

Likewise if the stones in the wall are spaced too close together, too tight, if the joints are too 'the same', the thing can become just as uninteresting. The conversation doesn't have opportunity to get started. There is no dialogue. The positives outweigh the negatives. The whole thing becomes a monologue, a lecture, a boring dissertation.

The space between the wall stones (and the space between us all) is so very important, and worth talking about again sometime. 

Maybe tomorrow.

Arch your back

I had our 'creative walling' workshop class at Gualala begin by warming up with a few stretches and then we did a couple of arches and then some simple building exercises. It is important not to over do it on the first day.