Stone Sculpture

I started building stone sculptures on a large rock that gets fully submerged at high tide off the house in Camden because my new friend, and as you can see from the photo above, highly skilled inspirational photographer, Arthur Durand (checkout his work artdurandphoto.com) was building some. It looked like fun and it was.

Is this sculpture a self portrait? Does it matter?

Art had been experiencing and photographing the land up there for several weeks (he's on a road trip from his home in California and living in his camper that's mounted on the bed of his Toyota pickup next to the water's edge) before we arrived, and we clicked immediately. Here's Art shooting some high tide photos of my first, and most long-lived sculpture.

And while he was building his sculptures on the beach, the large rock off the dining room seemed to be the place to build mine (pay no attention to the cute fur balls in the photo).

I had no idea, however, when I started stacking big stones on top of the bigger rock at low tide, how much the whole exercise would move me. The act of picking the stones and then placing them on top of each other was a wonderfully peaceful and unintellectual activity. All I did was grab some rocks that looked like they may fit together, and start stacking them. And it soon became apparent that they way the rocks looked was the least accurate indicator of how well they would fit together. It was all feel.

This does not look like something that could withstand the tide rising up to the bottom of the top stone?

Check out the gaps. I love that the whole statue can take a literal beating, and continue to stand inspite of the fact that it's perched on these tiny contact points and could be pushed over with on finger. There's some kinda lesson/metaphor there.

I love the barnacles as well. And the rocks just "chunked" into place when I was building it. 

It stayed up for several days because we had some unusually calm days and the high tides weren't as high as they can be. But the tide did come up to the base of the top stone.

Eventually, I set up another stone high and dry on the sea wall next to the house. Maybe I'm a Druid. Or maybe I just like seeing these statues and being reminded of the importance of standing tall and withstanding the rising tide, while also being vulnerable enough to be knocked over with one finger, and then starting all over again.