Opening

Granite. 2008. 26″ high with base.

Opening is a flower unfurling to the world.  The inside of the flower is delicate and new, organic, and expanding.  The outside is still as rough as I found it, including a population of barnacles still clinging to the stone after more than a decade out of saltwater.

My greatest challenge was to develop the boundaries between its different textures.  At the rim of the flower, a highly-polished inner surface meets the rough, uncarved outer surface of the boulder, and meets another rough surface carved with a pneumatic hammer.  Down inside the corolla of the flower, that polished surface meets the sharply-indented surface of the pistil, which I carved with a spinning diamond-covered ball.  Most difficult of all was to carve right up to the barnacles with the pneumatic hammer without dislodging them.

Photos by Lee Gass