AiR – II : Smoothing, cracking and looking for stones…
In the stone-cutting workshop, learning, looking, listening and feeling my way, I realised I was absorbing so much exciting and new information through my hands.
This is how I started to work with a few of the pieces that I cut from a large chunk of rock crystal quartz.
The top shapes have been roughed out and the pieces below are as they were sawn.
The quartz I cut was full of very beautiful inclusions that I decided to try to learn from. I cut, then roughed out, leaving parts of the natural cleavage intact. I then smoothed, faceted and polished to the point where the stone almost cracked but didn't.
Whilst trying to retain some areas of natural cleavage, I smoothed the outer surfaces on increasingly fine faceting laps so that the ice-like inclusions might be seen more clearly.
Here they look rather wonderful to me, however I found to my cost that with so many inclusions, the pieces I created were extremely fragile, despite sparking under the diamond saw blade. They have since chipped and cracked, even whilst wrapped and carried with care.
Next I worked with this piece of obsidian. I decided to rough out some curved depressions and smooth out the sharpness to make a sculptural piece to fit in my closed hand; a tool for thinking perhaps.
Just as I felt that I was getting somewhere using a carborundum wheel, the obsidian cracked in two. I couldn't help thinking that the curves of the natural cleavage looked much more beautiful than my interventions thus far, and realised that this is inevitably a common reaction for beginners working in stone.
When I travelled to Germany, as Artist in Residence at the Department of Gemstones and Jewellery, in partnership with the Jakob Bengel Foundation most of my luggage weight was taken up with a skeleton tool kit.
As Idar-Oberstein is renowned for the mining and cutting of the stone that sits under and around it, particularly agate, I had decided to leave my beloved wild stone tools safely at home in my workshop. I assumed that it would be easy to find stones that had been rounded by rushing river water, tumbled and textured by time.
I soon realised how spoiled I am to have a hoard of wild tools in amongst the very varied shingle beach stones at the end of the road where I live in England. Most of the rocks around Idar-Oberstein are angular, and many of the accessible river stones either leave a reddish deposit on the metal or are covered with crumbly material that surrounds heavily pitted stone.
Fortunately, after a month or so, an MFA student kindly drove me farther into the countryside to one or two likely riverside spots to look for wild tools. The river water was running high after Winter melts and Spring rainfall, so we couldn't see through the thick sediment that was stirred up, and even if we could have seen any suitable stones, we'd have needed chest-high waders and ropes! I managed to find just four stones, nestled nearby under nettles on the banks of the river.
The best of the wild tools found: the ‘anvil’ left a reddish deposit and the large chip on the ‘hammer’ stone had sharp edges. Luckily I was able to smooth the edges using tools in the stone workshop.
In truth, on the beach back home, I wouldn’t have given such stones a second look. Later however, as I was working, hammering this piece of fine silver with these wild tools, I felt my entire body relax. I suddenly felt more free than I had in a couple of weeks.
I managed eventually to remove the reddish residue using pumice powder. The students wondered why I didn't just use the ultrasonic cleaner… well, I try to limit chemical and electrical usage wherever possible, and a mixture of pumice and elbow grease does the job.
So, just over half way through my time in Idar-Oberstein, with plenty of exciting ideas emerging; talking to the students about their work and attending an absolutely fascinating Mineralogy class once a week, strangely, I found myself, in a place renowned for stones and minerals sourced allover the world, to be still on the hunt for more wild stone tools for working metal.
