From the earthbound to soaring works of art

pics at link:

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Actually, “works” doesn’t do it justice. She creates with stone, bends it to her will and imagination, twists it, turns it, spins it into eye-catching, improbable shapes, taking our landscape’s most elemental pieces and lofting them as if they were nature’s snap-to Legos – albeit Legos weighing 50 or 100 or 200 pounds that will crush unwary fingers (something she’s experienced). Why does she do this?

“I practice stonework because it makes me happy,” is her simple answer.

How she came to work in what has traditionally been a man’s field is anything but simple. How she came to transcend the boundaries of the traditional stone-layers craft – creating free-standing arches and circles and balancing cairns – is a story of an artistic career derailed and delayed that eventually could not be suppressed. Or as she puts it, she finally found her career “when the artist in me came out of the box.”

Her early life is soap opera fodder – communes, hanging with the Grateful Dead, smashing up a car, shuttling between her divorced parents, elopement at 18 and pregnancy – and was lively chronicled in a New York Times story. Suffice to say island life on Martha’s Vineyard with her father felt stultifying, especially being conscripted to help him in his work as a mason.

At the age of 16, she found herself forced to earn her keep as his assistant, as the mule hauling stones and bricks for chimneys and fireplaces. It was brutal hot work. “I really resented it. As a 16-year-old I ran and ran all day long, and I wasn’t paid,” she says. But that unwilling apprenticeship taught her perseverance, she admits, and how to do hard labor. Her seduction in stone and art, however, would have to wait.

“I had visions of going to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) when I was in high school. I was very artsy,” she says. But eloping and having three kids and coming up to Vermont as a single mom buried that hope, well, like a ton of bricks.

“My dream of being an artist got stopped. Being an artist, being anything other than being a mother, was not possible,” she explains.

As her children grew older, though, she eventually got back to work doing landscaping and some stonework. In her early 30s, she entered a sculpture competition in Burlington, though “I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do.”

She ended up studying arches and after some trial and rock-collapsing error, figured how to build them. The rest is history, writ in stone across the continent and abroad, often combined with teaching the stoneworkers art. She has left her stone signature in China and England, Canada and France and Mexico and all across the U.S., and in a historic Italian stone village near Varese in the alpine foothills north of Milan. (Photos and details at www.myearthwork.com).

Recently, she was profiled for Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, but spend some time with Alvin, and it’s clear all this publicity has not gone to her head (speaking to a visiting friend, she dismisses the idea of publicists and “media manipulation.”) Though she is widely traveled and does her art in tony places such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Boulder, Colorado, pull into her yard a couple miles south of Morrisville on Route 100, and you’ll find a very laid-back Vermont scene. There’s an old 1810 barn that is her new studio gallery and a compound that is a unique mashup of Old MacDonald’s farm, a hippie commune and an artist colony. She herself is not exactly sure what it is, admitting, “it’s a little tricky.”

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http://vtdigger.org/2014/06/22/state-artist-makes-earthbound-medium-soar/

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