Blog

Wildlife Moments

  Watching the busy birds and animals at my workshop and in the surrounding fields and countryside fills me with pleasure. Sometimes I’ve dedicated hours to it and seen nothing, and at other times everywhere I turn there’s spectacle and revelation. Those days of wildlife moments fill me to bursting with inspiration, with energy, to […]

Limestone Country

  Limestone Country is a meditation on how people live in a landscape, how they alter it, and how the landscape, in turn, shapes them.  It is also a love letter to a sedimentary rock, exploring how different communities around the world are bound together by their shared geology. Over the last few weeks of […]

North Yorkshire Open Studios 2017 comes to a close

  This morning I’m packing up and reflecting on the last two busy weekends of North Yorkshire Open Studios 2017.  Your visits and comments have made me very happy – thankyou. So many of you have talked of ‘wanting to touch’ and the ‘huggability’ of my stones – which is a lovely thing – and […]

Sculpture in the Garden – a map

  This afternoon I’ve been putting together a map, showing the locations of my sculpture in the garden – so if you’re visiting Nunnington Hall you won’t miss any! Just as I finished I got a call from a lady to say she’d been round the garden today and loved her visit, especially coming across […]

Sculpture in the garden at Nunnington Hall

  Here is Hedgehog in the Cutting Garden (which is also the vegetable garden) at Nunnington Hall. All the pieces arrived in the rain and wind, it was a very soggy setting up, but today they enjoyed the drying sunshine and look much happier. High Moor Goat surveys – looking out on a live willow […]

Lookout Bird

  Bird sculpture in sandstone. If you’re a Lookout Bird you need to be alert, have a long neck to stretch above the meadow grass for scanning, and possess  keenly watchful eyes.      

Hedgehog Sculpture

  Hedgehog sculpture carved in Yorkstone On average an adult hedgehog has around 5000-7000 spines – each one a hollow, stiff hair about an inch long.   A baby hedgehog naturally sheds its spines as the new, adult ones grow through, a process known as ‘quilling’. There is a little trail from one of my stone […]

White Birds Sculpture

  Three stone birds make up this sculpture – I suppose a triptych of sorts – which I’ve carved in Portland Limestone.  The bird shapes are similar, but each in a slightly different, but associated pose and designed to be appreciated together. The birds are part of Naturalithic my exhibition at Nunnington Hall which opens […]

Hot weather and hammer handles

  The spell of hot and dry weather has caused the handles on my stone carving hammers and mallets to become loose.  The wood dries out and shrinks just enough to cause the iron mallet head to slip and move about.  It doesn’t help with carving! It is something that happens over time with hammers […]

Maltese quarry message

  When I saw the M&G Garden, winner of Best Show Garden at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show it made me feel at home, all that stone and feeling as though I was at the quarry.  The designer, James Basson has created the dry, dusty, stony feel very well, with the planting looking to […]