Watch a Masterpiece Emerge from a Solid Block of Stone | Short Film Showcase

I always find that you have to be a bit mad to become a stone carver. I mean, this isn't the Renaissance anymore. Stone isn't a primary building material anymore. Why, why would you go into an industry? Why would you go into a profession that is expensive, takes a lot of time, and the material is heavy and hard to move? It is expensive to obtain even before you do anything to it.

And then, after that, even after you've made something out of it, you have to convince people that this is a worthwhile endeavor. What I always find is that the answer to that question is always that there just wasn't any other option. Once the idea of becoming a stone carver comes into your head, then you just have to find some way of doing it.

Every project will usually start with a sketch of some kind, and if you're lucky enough to have a live model, then it will start with a clay model. So, if it's a head, you'll find all the prominences—the sort of absolute prominences. You'll find the tips of the ears, you'll find the nose, you'll find the chin, you'll find where the underhang of the jaw comes down, you'll find where the sternal notch comes in, you'll find the top of the head, you'll find sort of the slope to the nose, and usually the slope to the chin.

All the sort of angles that make up a human face—a sort of geometric head, if you will. The clay, when you do a clay model of someone, that's where you're working out the idea and you're getting acquainted with their face. You're talking to them and looking at them. That's really what it's about: just looking. A lot of people don't recognize the fact that clay is quite—it's an easy substance. It's soft, you can move it around very fast, you can build it up really fast, and then take it away really fast.

So, there is no point in being precious about it. If you make a mistake, you shouldn't hesitate. You can just discard that and start again, and it won't take that long. If you can imagine doing something, if you have the skills to do it, you can pretty much execute anything that you want.

That transition from your imagination through your eyes and your hands into a block of stone is the most incredible feeling. Stone carvers are often taught that simply carving something in stone is enough—that that sheer ability to take something that's been cut from the earth and create something beautiful with it is enough. That isn't something that is shared by any other kind of artist.

Once you start carving, there are no sort of hard and fast rules. You rely on the fact that you can look and measure, and that you have an instinct for this. If you can look at something and translate it into your hands and then make the chisel do what you want it to do, then you'll be okay.

If you're doing the clay or if you're doing the transition from the clay into the stone, often my brain is quite—not chaotic, but you're making so many decisions probably until the sort of last day that you're working on it. Your brain is just constantly making decisions of like, “Have I taken that too low? What am I doing? What measurement is that? Where's this?” Everything is just sort of going through your mind very, very fast, and you're not even aware that it's happening.

But then you finish the day and you're exhausted, and you wonder why. The sound that it makes is incredibly satisfying. A lot of people who aren't carvers comment on that. That feeling of a well-sharpened chisel going into stone smoothly and cleanly—and that transition of looking at a stone and telling your hands to do something, and then your hands telling a chisel and a mallet to do something, and then have it take off exactly the right amount of stone, having it do exactly what you want—that is the most satisfying feeling.

On a human face, even though there's a change in pigment, there's no—and like you come to the edge of the lips and it just carries on going. If you try and make it a stark difference, then the face will look strange. The skin is sort of a continuous surface that undulates and has tension in certain places and slack in other places.

It takes a long time to train to be a stone carver, and it's not an easy job. Once you are trained, you're still learning. I'm still learning with every job that I do. I learn something new, and I will hopefully continue to learn. That seems to be the payoff—that once you've created something, it takes up a physical space in the world, and it has a permanence that will hopefully outlast you. It's not vulnerable either.

I want people to see that I've pushed the material as far as it can possibly go. I maybe want people to see themselves in it. I want them maybe to wonder about my reasons for carving it. I want people to have—I want people to maybe argue about why I made it in the way that I did and have different ideas of what the reason is and the purpose.