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Thoughts & Opinions

The Role of Reverie in Working with Stone

By Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Ph.D., FIPA

These are excerpts from a talk I gave recently at a conference. If you would like to see the full text, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  Jade Storm - unknown stone (Jadeite?)

After defining reverie as both a state of mind that is open and receptive and also the kinds of things that come into the mind when it is in this state, I go on to say that I begin a piece without an idea of what it will become. Something in the stone catches my attention, and we go on from there. I continue:

The Kinds of Things that Come in Reverie
Now, I want to be more specific about what happens for me in the reverie that is part of working with stone. Things come into my mind in reverie – many kinds of things in many forms – that that I may decide to try to embody in the piece in some way. Gesture, something in the form of a bodily movement, is one example. Or a visual image might emerge, perhaps an image of what a part of the stone could look like or perhaps an image that has no obvious direct connection at all with what I am doing. Or a word or a phrase might come into my mind, evoked by some aspect of the figure emerging in the stone.

Black & White Torso, AlabasterGesture, Movement, Body
The most basic form that my reverie takes in working with stone – and of course it might be different for other people – is a body reverie. It is generally movement images that come into my mind. By this I do not mean a visual image of someone making the gesture. It's more an internal feeling or sense of the gesture, a feeling in what you might call my internal psychic body that is kind of on the border with my actual physical body. A word I sometimes use for this kind of thing is "quasi-bodily" or "quasi-sensory." It's very characteristic of the aesthetic dimension of experience. When this kind of internal gesture – image comes into my mind I often make the gesture with my hand, so that there is a kind of external version of it as well. And of course if I want to embody that gesture in the stone I am going to have to use my hand to do so.

Of course a stone sculpture does not literally move. The gesture, the movement in it, is only implied by the form. Another way of saying this would be that as I form the sculpture the piece becomes a kind of a body, and the posture of that body implies certain forces of gravity and muscular tension that in a human body would give rise to or result from movement.

At the same time, if I am contemplating the stone within reverie, I may start to feel discomfort in what I am calling my internal psychic body. It is as though I'm empathizing with the stone-as-body by identifying my psychic body with it, and I may feel all sorts of psychic body sensations – again on the border of concrete body sensations – that tell me that the part of the piece I am contemplating is not quite right. "It" – that is, the sculpture as I am identifying with it – may feel stiff or tight, or lumpy somewhere, for instance. I may feel stifled, even almost suffocated. I think this too is a version of reverie.

Translation
But how is what comes into my mind in reverie, translated into the actual sculpture? Mental activity and a piece of stone are not very similar. This goes back to what I've said about gesture. Let us say that what comes into my mind is a gesture of curling over. As I said before, when you're making a stone sculpture you're making a body. And we ourselves are bodies; we all know how to make bodies do things. We know how to curl over, for instance. And conversely we know how something looks when it's curled over. So we chisel or file stone away so that a curling-over starts to be visible.

FinishingDancing Bear, Soapstone
As the piece gets farther along, and starts to hang together, starts not to be so radically changeable any more – starts to be "set in stone," in fact – what used to be in my reverie is now in the piece itself. The sculpture is coming to be what I call a being in itself. It is not a human being, but it is made of psyche as well as of stone, because reverie translated through my hands has now gone into the stone.

Conclusion
What motivates me to make sculpture is a kind of curiosity, a sort of nonphysical hunger. There is something I would like to see and touch, something I would like to have existing in front of me that is not the same as anything that already exists, something new that doesn't exist yet. I can't even imagine what it is. But I know that if I make a piece of sculpture this is what will happen. Something I could not even imagine beforehand will now exist.

Walter Benjamin once said the work of art reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill.* The desire is to create something that will have this effect. Even if a piece of sculpture is weird, ugly, or disturbing, if it has come to be a being in itself in the way I have talked about, then it can be looked at and looked at – and remember that a piece of sculpture is three-dimensional, and the number of angles from which it can be looked at is infinite – it can be looked at and looked at and it seems as though my eyes can never have their fill.

*Walter Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969) , p. 187.

A Bird In The Hand from Silver Falls Symposium

BIRD IN THE HAND FROM SILVER FALLS SYMPOSIUM
By Lisa Svircic

Lisa Svircic

When I joined NWSSA a year ago, I had no idea how awesome you all are and how much I'd learn in such a short time! I am really grateful for this organization and for everyone involved in it.

My first time at Silver Falls was perfect. Carving within a circle of trees surrounded by inspiring sculptors and instructors was my idea of heaven. I came with no ideas of what to carve, so I let the stone speak to me. I love figurative sculpture and knew it would be related to the body somehow.

The shape of the stone lent itself to carving a small open hand. I didn't want an empty hand, so a dove seemed to be the best solution. Placing the dove backwards in the hand with the head tucked down was intuitive. As I carved, I felt an emotion of the dove wanting to rest or to hide and be left alone. The hand needed to be gentle and open so the dove could choose to rest there or take flight.

Bird In The Hand

My background is in painting and drawing, so sculpture is a fairly new adventure for me. I love being able to express myself in different mediums because there's so much to be said! Stone sculpting is very relational for me. Each stone says something different and the journey from start to finish is a conversation that I truly enjoy. Plus, the fact that stone is ancient and of the earth is very appealing to me. Eternal, expressive and natural. It's the perfect medium.

Lisa Svircic

Learn more about Lisa and her work at: lsvir.com

Interesting & Perhaps Inspirational Art: Elizabeth Turk

Elizabeth Turk  Elizabeth-Turk-2

Employing a variety of electric grinders, files, and small dental tools with a dexterous touch, her technical virtuosity is on full display in “The Collars,” a series of sixteen painstakingly carved sculptures that explore a rich variety of organic and geometric patterns. The elaborate collars in this collection combine allusions to decorative motifs and the self-organizing systems of the natural world, drawing from lace-making and Elizabethan fashion as well as botanical, skeletal, and architectural structures. Continuing the theme of fragile, textile-like compositions with the strength and heft of stone, Turk creates a surprising sense of buoyancy and undulating movement in her recent series of marble ribbons suspended in midair. With these and other visually arresting feats of precision, Turk is pushing the physical limits of her material and reviving a classical medium for contemporary artistic exploration.

Elizabeth Turk from The Collars seriesElizabeth Turk received a B.A. (1983) from Scripps College and an M.F.A. (1994) from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibits at such venues as the Mint Museum of Art (North Carolina), the University of Virginia Art Museum, the American Institute of Architecture (New York), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC). 

See more at: MacArthur Foundation Elizabeth Turk Tools