A Stone Eye

A trip to Plainfield, Vermont in the F450 last week netted a dump load of wall stone from Mitchell’s Quarry. The quarry’s bedrock is a layered mix of quartzite, a granular metamorphic rock, and phyllite, a slaty rock with minute scales of mica.

Yesterday, I built some of the stone into a short wall to test its quality. The hope was that it would be good material to use in the stone-eye sculpture construction because the quarry is located a reasonable distance from the project site, and because the stone is generally planar. Since the construction will be vertically bedded walling, the stone needs to have flat surfaces for maximum contact. I must also be able to trim and shape its edges with a hammer. The test walling proved the stone acceptable in most aspects, but thicker pieces tended to fracture along cleavage planes when I struck an edge with multiple hammer blows.

Today I’m transferring information from 60 pages of data onto a master plan for the stone-eye construction. Corner points in a grid of 6” squares are given numerical values that correspond to their position on the surface of the sculpture. The 32’ diameter sculpture will require more than 3,000 points-in-space to guide the construction.

Dan SnowDecember 4, 2011metamorphic rock, model, morrisville, phyllite, project, quartzite, sculpture, stone, stone eye, stone supply, vermont