This sculpture was made on the same day as the Stone & Branch wall and Cracked Stones. I’d found a large number of flat, grey worn pebbles near the high tide line. The largest of these is about nine inches in diameter and there is a variation in size through to about one and a half inches.
Spiral forms have always had a special connection with me. To me, they always remind me of the dance of life.
I found a large boulder with a flattish top. This boulder was too large to move and felt as though it had been in this place for an age, definitely not to be moved in the near future. The gently sloping, flat top of the boulder together with its size had a feeling of solidity and this led to the idea of creating a cairn. Because of the nature of the flat grey rocks I felt that I could build on this feeling of solidity using the idea of a spiral incorporated in the cairn, as though the cairn had been twisted out of the rock itself.
I started by forming the inner core from boulders and plenty of sand and created the spiral cairn by pushing the flat stones into the sand in a spiral form, layer by layer. It didn’t go perfectly, but the imperfections are part of the organic process that I deal with.
The cairn feels solid in nature as does the rock that it stands upon. Both complementing one another with the transience of energy through the two forms.