Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust

Fallen Fossil -- described by Charles Hall in Art Review Yearbook 1994 as "one of the most impressive carvings on the site (or indeed in the country)" epitomises the approach of the Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust - an intensely personal response to the quarry environment, the landscape and history of the stone, assisted by the gift of the stone-worker's skills and knowledge.

"Fallen Fossil came after regular visits to the Museum of Natural History, where I was attracted by some fossils embedded in the matrix stone, punctuating the rough broken quality of the stone.

The evolution and realisation of the idea, first derived in the museum, were made entirely in the quarry. It was the quarry which determined the scale of the piece -- I took as a measure the height of a south facing whit bed surface somewhat taller than myself.

The form of the piece, especially the head, owed its origin to a little red plant which I found while walking around the quarry soon after my arrival, influenced by the scroll-like shapes typical of ionic column capitals, they being more suitable and robust when translated into stone."

"Fallen Fossil looks back towards fossils, and forwards towards architecture. For me, Tout Quarry is a place of reflection. You think of London as a positive sculpture -- you can't think of it without this stone, the positive outcome of this negative space here.

In terms of the future -- for me it was the experience of working collaboratively, this wealth of material, this wealth of space - a contrast to perennially under-resourced, over-crowded art schools. Stone has such a very strong feeling of permanence, of geological time."
(Stephen Marsden)

Fallen Fossil

Argument -- to show that physical/craft involvement in the production of thinking contemporary art is an essential element in the creation of an art-work.

Coming to Portland as I did in 1985 after I had finished my studies at Reading, I was given six weeks and a bit of money to make a work in the quarry which tied in with its environment. My aim was to transform a little portion of that quarry, neither to add anything nor to take anything away. To make something fairly low-key, but not something so unobtrusive that it would go over the heads of people visiting that little private space in which I made it.

I was living and working in the quarry and did not have the luxury of a hotel to go back to after a day's carving, so there was a healthy sense of urgency to get the job done. That sense of urgency was not so healthily manifest one night at about 3 am, when I felt rocks being thrown onto my tent from the fifteen foot bank at the foot of which I was sleeping. That night I didn't feel welcome. I never met the offender face to face. I only saw his silhouette against the night sky, but after that he came to represent the manic element that pervades the island. This element was especially present at night when the mind's floodgates are open to imagination - there is strife mixed with harmony; there is a prison alongside the more peaceable activities of fishing; winning stone involved blood as well as moments of triumph.

I moved out of my tent into an old caravan (with a hard roof) with some students from Wimbledon and felt more secure. But all the while I was working in the quarry there was this strong sense of past human exertion - almost a dark feeling that in fact helped me with my work.

Alongside the quarrymen's efforts and skill, I did not want my own efforts to seem puny and amateur (even though by comparison that is what they were) and at some stage I had to swallow my pride. With blistered fingers and a wrecked soft-iron hammer, I sought the advice of the inimitable Skylark. Skylark Durston, although he had better things to do and more important projects underway, welcomed me into his home, sat me down and we began to talk about his involvement in other sculptors' work, which made my own project in the quarry look rather pathetic. He nevertheless took an interest in what I was up to, and the result of my visit was that he lent me his own Fisher hammer, and promised to come and see my work in the quarry - saying as I was leaving and forgetting my own soft-iron hammer under the table "Don't forget to take this marvelous piece of equipment!"

Although I said just now that my aim was to add nothing nor to take anything from the quarry, I ended up doing both - for the vertical negative part of the piece is carved, therefore taken out of the stone surface - and the other horizontal element in three parts came from a block which had its origins in a different quarry from Tout. This long block was brought from the other quarry, and as the Poclain could go no further down the narrow alley, was placed about fifty yards from the site where I intended to cut it up and then roll or slide it, Egyptian-style, down to the site.

I had never split a piece of stone that big before, so again it was Skylark who came to my rescue, and during the drilling and positioning of the plugs and feathers (kindly lent to me by Edgar Maidman of ARC Quarries) Skylark had found the bed of the stone, and was telling me the best way of going about it "You can cut it like toast, as thin as you like".

Stephen Marsden working on Fallen Fossil

Skylark said that when splitting "make sure that no-one is around to watch you, it's bad luck". And in fact when I was driving in the plugs to split the stone, I had to chase away a couple of bystanders intent on the failure of my project. Needless to say, the stone cut like well-sliced toast. The three pieces being separated, thus lighter I was able to roll them into place and continue with the carving. Even at this stage Skylark didn't abandon me, and sometimes as I was working, on feeling another person's presence in the echoing space, I would turn and realise he had been there, like a bird watching me as I worked.

We live in the age that we live in -- we can lament the loss of the craft element or the decreasing involvement on a physical level of the contemporary artist in his or her own work -- but by doing this we are just taking the opposite side in a polemic struggle that has been going on for nearly a century now, and thus we prolong a debate that is leading us nowhere.

For me it is obvious that the intervention of craftsmen like Skylark is fundamental in projects of this nature, not only because on leaving art school a student will not be fully equipped to deal with stone, but also because Skylark's involvement is in the land he knows - Portland is his territory. This kind of personal knowledge cannot be acquired through learning, so that when we as artists come into contact with it we have to recognise it as a rare and special kind of energy -- if we are receptive to it, it can be valuable fodder for our own work.

(Stephen Marsden, 1993)