Isle of Portland
"Carved by time out of a single stone" is how Thomas Hardy described the Isle of Portland, a rock outcrop 4 by 1½ miles that juts out from the Dorset coast into the English Channel, linked to the mainland only by the great sweep of Chesil Bank.
But Portland has also been shaped -- literally -- by quarrymen. For centuries, man and nature have both contributed to the distinctive contours of the Portland landscape. This has left landmarks that have become monuments to time - geological features that mark where the original land surface once stood.
Since 1983 the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust has brought artists to Portland to work creatively in response to the quarry environment, giving back through creativity where so much stone has gone away.
The Trust has not promoted public commissioned art, ie: sculpture in the public sector. Instead, it has worked to build integral links to the lives of the quarrymen and masons who worked the stone, and has enabled the artists to share with them in an exchange of knowledge and skills.
Over the years, the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust has developed many working collaborations between artists and the Portland quarrymen and masons - the inheritors of the skills that have shaped the Portland landscape and identity.
Portland seen from Abbotsbury
Our experience of working on the Island since 1983 has resulted in an appreciation of the importance of the personal aspects of people's lives, their knowledge and their relationship with the landscape.
Until 30 years ago, the quarrying and masonry skills were entirely manual -- unchanged for hundreds of years. Many of these men and women are still alive. The aim of the project is to keep alive their landscape, in both the literal and metaphorical sense - thereby helping to secure and strengthen the living tradition of Portland.
The old quarry gangs and working methods have almost disappeared, the remaining coastal quarries will be infilled over the next sixty years, and important features such as piers and jetties are gradually vanishing. However, if people care enough, these physical losses need not result in the loss of values, meanings and associations. For the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust, this is the purpose of art.
Portland and the Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust
There's something extraordinary about the Isle of Portland, something that affects everyone who lives on, or visits, this great slab of Jurassic limestone which so magnificently interrupts the Dorset coastline.
Something in the air, in the sea, and above all in the stone of Portland inspires people -- to build, to make art, to write, to live. The place seems to have the power to lay bare the processes of creation. Giant ammonite fossils emerge from the sediment of 150 million years. Quarries yield a limestone of unrivalled strength and beauty, the stone that Wren chose for the rebuilding of London. A stone which, when struck by a steel chisel, rings like a bell - the purer the stone, the clearer the tone.
In 1983 a group of artists started working with Portland quarrymen to create Britain's first sculpture quarry. Each summer, sculptors, students, and masons worked in the naturally regenerated Tout Quarry. The results included pieces such as Stephen Marsden's "Fallen Fossil" with its powerful resonance of place and time, and Antony Gormley's "Still Falling".
But they also, in a typically organic Portland way, created a resource for which the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust is gaining recognition through its inspirational approach towards sculpture in the environment.
The Trust is now extending access to this unique site to more people, through a range of residential stone-carving workshops, designed for absolute beginners as well as experienced sculptors. Former students speak of the enriching experience of working with Portland stone in its place of origin, and of working with such a range of people - including some whose lives (and the lives of their forebears) have been dedicated to the quarries.
Bill Hicks -- writer and stonecarver
