Inhabiting Stone

Inhabiting Stone invites the reader on a personal odyssey that explores what it means to be a sculptor, what it means to manifest a work of art.

The book is structured into four parts:

Part I explores the notion of art by looking into creativity, abstraction, the relationship between art and technique, as well as by examining the validity of cultural strongholds, such as that one must first master the rules before one is entitled to break them.

Part II revisits the entire process of making a sculpture. In doing so, it covers everything from finding the right materials, the beginnings of working with stone, the search for form, the nature of the process, the road of artistic development and so forth. Besides a few exercises, it mostly refrains from giving technical instructions but keeps its focus on the essential, namely: How to inhabit stone?

Part III explores the internal dimension of the same journey. As part of this inquiry, it develops the notion that the sculptor is not only the shaper but also the shaped; that the stone is giving form to the sculptor, just as much as the sculptor is giving form to the stone.

Part IV discusses the metaphysical and ecological implications of this way of working and contextualizes its relevance for the development of sculpture as an artform.

Whom is the book for?

Inhabiting Stone is for anyone curious about the art of sculpture, creativity and the quest of becoming an individual more generally. Because even though it centers around the art of stone sculpture, its underlying principles apply to all the arts, if not to say: to all of life.