Dry Stone Walling is an Art

9/28/2009

A beautiful stone wall, using the ancient craft of dry stone walling, is currently under construction at The Harley School. The project began in September and will be completed by Thanksgiving, with the help of Harley students and well-known dry stone wallers.

Chuck Eblacker, of Eblacker and Stone in Rochester, is leading the project and has secured visits from other dry stone wallers to complete the construction. The week of September 7-11, master waller Dan Snow of Vermont, is working with Eblacker.  Snow is one of a handful of dry stone wallers to have mastercraftsman certification. Both are members of the prestigious Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain,

The completed wall will stand 42 inches high hold the dual purpose of function and beauty, serving as a safeguard from the road, as well as a handcrafted artwork to experience and enjoy. The completed wall will have a circular gathering space where students can relax and read and classes may be held. In addition, students will assemble and bury a time capsule in this space.

Dry stone walling is the art of placing stone in such a way that gravity and friction, not mortar, hold the work together. No cement or mortar is used in the process, but stones are shaped to fit together as a puzzle. The final structure is more flexible than mortar and may stand for a century or more.

Students in the Upper School course, The Stone Wall, will be taught by Chris Hartman, environmental sustainability coordinator at Harley and Tim Rogers, art teacher. A blend of apprenticeship and intellectual exploration, the course will focus on the history, art, politics, and construction of stone walls. Students will also have the opportunity to help construct the wall, talk with renowned stone wallers, and take field trips locally to see other dry stone walls.

Visiting Artists:

About Dan Snow, Artist-in-Residence/Dry Stone Waller, Sept. 8-11
Dan Snow is an art maker and dry stone craftsman. He has been building stone walls for thirty years and his work has been the subject of articles in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, This Old House, and Garden Design.

Snow creates site specific, environmental works, builds traditional dry stone constructions and assembles small-scale, stand-alone structures. His dry stone constructions include fences, pillars, staircases, arches and grandstands. Environmental works include grottos, pavilions and causeways. Sculptures combine stone, wood and metal into three-dimensional fantasy worlds.

Snow has been building with stone since working on an Italian castle restoration in 1972. His career as a professional dry stone waller began in 1976 with field wall repairs and retaining wall constructions. In 1986 and 1994, Snow apprenticed with Master craftsmen wallers in the British Isles.

After 13 years in the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain’s Craftsman Certification Scheme, Snow achieved his Mastercraftsman certificate in 2000. Dan Snow has instructed many workshops in dry stone walling and lectured on the craft across the USA, in Canada and Great Britain. As a DSWA Examiner he has organized test venues and tested dozens of wallers in the certification scheme.

In 2005 and 2007, Dan Snow was invited by the University of Art and Design, Helsinki to lecture on environmental art and instruct 1-2 weeklong workshops, with Environmental Art Department graduate students, in the Finnish countryside. At Kansas State University, in 2008, Snow presented a slide lecture on his artwork and creative process to a large audience of faculty and students.

In 2001 Snow authored “In the Company of Stone”, published by Artisan, with photographs of his work by Peter Mauss. “Stone Rising,” a film by Camilla Rockwell, released in 2005, captures the spirit of Snow’s constructions and chronicles the process of their creation. “Listening to Stone,” 2008, is Dan Snow’s second book of practical and poetic observations on the walling life.

About Andrew Pighills

Rock upon rock, carefully stacked, nothing to hold them together but gravity — a well-built dry stone wall will last for generations. Andrew Pighills builds such walls. He chooses the rock, fits it into place, perhaps chipping off an end for a better fit. A mortared wall is basically just a concrete block with rocks stuck into it. A dry wall, on the other hand, is part of the landscape

“It’s a living entity,” says Pighills. The wind will chase the seed into the wall’s crevices, then a chipmunk may following that seed as soon as that day’s section of the wall is complete.

Pighills, owner with his wife, Michelle, of English Gardens and Landscaping in Killingworth, has a romantic attachment to stone walls, which he got in his native Yorkshire Dales in the north of England, the pastoral home of Wordsworth, Coleridge and veterinarian author James Herriot.

Immigrating to this country in 2001, he’s been a master dry stone craftsman for 38 years. He and fellow stone wall artisan Dan Snow have shared their knowledge in workshops. Pigshill is the builder, but he’s not always in charge of how a wall turns out. Any good wall is going to work with the landscape it will become part of. “I always find when I’m doing things like this that whatever’s there drives the result,” he says.

But something mysterious guides his building as well as he chooses stones to fit into the wall. “It comes to me so easily,” he says. “I can see a space and then find a stone that fits.”

He says most stone craftsmen tend to work alone, keeping in mind the stones available. “At any one time I may have 10-15 stones lodged into my head and I know just where they are.”

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