Great Gabbro

21″ high with base
fine-grained gabbro

I bought this rock at a stonecarving symposium many years ago, and loved it from the start for its improbable, intriguing, almost crazy form that I could not get enough of for all those years. Finally, in beginning to carve into the rock, I found myself exploring several themes.

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Great Gabbro won Honourable Mention in the Federation of Canadian Artists’ 2026 annual international Calendar Exhibition competition.

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As an abstracted human form, Great Gabbro expresses at the same time wild, whirling abandon, expansiveness, and a combination of vulnerability and balanced, thrusting power that conjures motion in the mind. I felt that motion while carving it, I wanted more of it the more I carved, and I named it Great Gabbro to embody and personify that sense.

As a study in geometry, optics, and a nod to the Double Helix, Great Gabbro is simple in structure but enjoys varied, unexpected, and almost unimaginably complex relationships with everything around. The smoothly-curving, highly polished surfaces carved into the rough, untouched rock are parallel, similar, back-to-back mirrors to the world, literally, in their reflections, all warped by the fact that the mirrors are, in the main, concave.