Some days just fit together in a magical way. The weather forecast wasn’t great and I had to scrape the frost off the car to start, but when I was working it was sunny, warm and very pleasant.
I find this part of Portland an intriguing place. These old abandoned quarries have a unique beauty where the industrial past has been taken over by nature. Nothing is quite normal or how it should be. I passed the place where I had worked on 23rd October and 13th November and to my amazement the sculpture was still complete despite the storms that we had had over the recent past. Not a stone out of place, quite remarkable.
I wandered on looking for a site that appealed and felt right and found clearing on a sort of promontory. This was set between two higher mounds of discarded quarry waste. Towards the sea the ground sloped steeply down about twenty feet to a ledge about ten feet across. Further to the north there were several large blocks of finished stone lined up ready for transportation to their destination. These had been left when the quarry closed. It feels slightly uneasy when you consider the toil that had been put into these blocks for them to be just discarded and left. They had an ethereal, Otherworldly feel to them, a cry from the past, not unlike a Marie Celeste moment. My thoughts turned to the workers who must have spent thousands of hours in this quarry in terrible conditions in all sorts of weather to create these and other blocks, but these are a hint of the legacy of these unknown workers.
My thoughts turned to the material for today’s work, the rough stone shards which are each a product of an individual hammer blow. There are absolutely thousands of these shards lying in this quarry. It brings to mind the reality of the immensity of the work carried out in just this one place.
I decide to build a simple cairn out of these stone shards. The simplicity of the piece fitted the setting with the sea pounding below. It would use the industrial waste of the past to honour the workers of the past.
As I started the cairn, a coin fell out of my pocket. This seemed appropriate. There is now a coin at the very centre of the finished piece, payment for the honour of those workers. After about half an hour I cut my finger quite badly on one of these very rough stones. I carried on working and my blood now lies within the cairn. A blood donation to their honour? I don’t know, it just seemed right that my blood should be added to theirs, I’m sure they bled at their work as well. I cut myself several more times on this stone before the work was finished.
I was constantly reminding myself of those workers, of the harshness of the environment, of the bleakness of their lives while I worked. I finished the structure of the cairn and then tried to make the surface of the cairn as smooth as possible with these harsh, sharp stones.
When I’d finished the piece seemed to lie serenely in the landscape. I’d seen nobody at all that day. I felt that I had made a small solitary offering to the Portland workers of the past.