LOCKDOWN JOURNAL: COVID-19.38 (Keith Ackerman)
Alabaster for my brother’s 60th, made during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown.
Since late March the lockdown has prevented me from going to the quarry in Tadcaster to work on Jacob’s Ladder, a public sculpture commissioned for Beeston in South Leeds. Jacob’s Ladder is part of BasementArtsProject’s On the Corner project and is funded and supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Index Festival of Visual Arts, Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019, Leeds Art Fund and Leeds Philosophical and Literary society.
Tess, my wife, and I spent the first 4 weeks of lockdown unwell with what our GP says was almost certainly Covid-19. It was unpleasant, so as my strength returned it felt wonderful to be able to carve again. I chose a small piece of softish stone to ease myself back into both health and carving. The stone is an Italian alabaster called Bardiglio. It has a variety of colours and levels of translucence, takes a high polish and can hold a sharp edge. In short it is a sublime material.
I set myself the task of trying to create a smallish sculpture that would sit well in my brother’s house and might work well enough to be his 60th birthday present. One place my brother was thinking of putting a sculpture is in their kitchen in a place which will not get much sunlight to back light the sculpture. Hence a key to the success of the piece would be creating edges which would allow the variegated translucence of the stone to work in relatively low light levels. I started practising on a piece of alabaster that I had worked before just to get back into carving.
It was very uplifting to be back carving,I find it a very meditative and calming process. It is a privilege to work with such beautiful material and to be uncovering surfaces that are millions of years old.
I began to realise that this particular piece of stone was so beautiful that I should not waste it even though it already had some conchoid forms carved into it from a previous project (uncompleted).
I had a sketch of a design that I thought might work:
I tried to use this design work with the existing conchoids but it did not work. So I needed a plan B.
I started by carving a hollow on the uncarved plain side, intending to make it deep enough to break through to the flat part of the carved side of the alabaster sheet. I would then see what shape of the hole I had created was when I broke through and see where things went from there.
I was aiming to carve more rounded forms than conchoid, and for the sculpture to have sharper edges than many of my previous pieces. So it all felt somewhat intimidating.
For me one of the wonderful aspects of carving stone is that the interaction between the tools and the stone somehow leads the form.
I used a combination of 9mm flat French fine tungsten carbide chisel and 20mm English (Garforth) bullnose (rounded chisel). The form just seemed to emerge and a way forward for the piece evolved.
The holes created on the other side of the stone had very ragged edges that did not work so I started to use a fine 120 grit tungsten carbide riffler, a type of file, to enlarge both the hollow and the resulting hole. This worked well. It was more difficult to get a satisfying shape of hollow but easier to get sharp but smooth edges to the break through holes. This process of the interaction between the stone, the tools and my intentions are all consuming and calming. A process that feels all the more extraordinary in disquieting times such as during this lockdown.
Once the overall form felt right I began to polish the alabaster with wet and dry sandpaper going from 80 grit to 3000 in 12 steps of increasingly fine grades. The startling and also unnerving thing about stone such as Bardiglio alabaster is that as you polish the stone strong patterns emerge in the stone surface. Some of these patterns are quite exquisite but you do not know how well they will work with what you have carved. The more you polish this stone the darker some parts become as others become more translucent.
Once I had finished polishing it I realised that some of the break through holes and edges did not work. So, I reworked the piece using a 240 grit diamond file and 240 grit riffler. After this I then went back through the wet and dry but only from 240 grit onwards. I now felt that the piece worked.
Keith Ackerman | May 2020