The Craving to Carve

I’ve always worked with different materials for my sculpture work, primarily clay. Clay offers a lot of freedom since you can either add or subtract material to achieve the final form. It gives you room to breathe and fix mistakes along the way. 

A couple of years ago, I started sculpting with stone—or more precisely, carving Italian marble. Working with stone is a thinking man game because there’s absolutely no room for error. For example, if you’re carving a nose and strike the hammer too hard, than that nose is gone, and you have no choice but to cut deeper into the stone, moving everything back to make space for a new nose. This is the subtractive process—there’s no adding stone back once it’s removed, It’s simply carve, carve, carve until you reveal the form. As Michelangelo famously said, “Free the form from the stone.”

The process itself is labor-intensive but quite magical. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing the form slowly emerge and watching the finished piece take shape. like stone, wood carving requires the same careful approach as stone. You have to remove the unwanted material to reveal the form, and if you make a mistake, there’s often little you can do to fix it. But with time and experience, you develop a sense of what works, and the process starts to flow. Eventually, you’re fully in control, shaping exactly what you want while removing everything unnecessary.