A few years ago, I was helping my parents box things up to sell their house, and found a copy of The Biggest Pumpkin Ever. This was a story that I loved, and the timing was perfect, I could now take this copy home and read it to my own daughter.
In the story, two mice, a field mouse and a house mouse, each stumble upon a pumpkin sprout and decide to help it grow. They work alternately day and night, without realizing the other is helping. They get advice along the way from their family members, and soon enough, it is on its way to gargantuan proportions. One wants to enter it into the pumpkin competition, the other wants to carve it into the biggest jack’o’lantern ever. One night, they finally bump into each other, and realize they’ve been working toward the same goal all along! But now, the pumpkin is bigger than a house - so a small army of volunteers helps tow the pumpkin into town for the contest, where it of course wins first prize, and then the whole town helps them carve it into a jack’o’lantern.
I kept thinking about this story over the past few years, and how collaboration is so powerful. Collaboration is what created the pyramids, its what created the Easter Island heads, it’s what created Stonehenge. These objects inspire us with wonder.
When I had gone back to school to study art, I was lucky to have some great teachers. One of them once mentioned an idea that his teacher told him, that, “if you can do it by yourself, you aren’t thinking big enough”. This children’s story, The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, epitomizes that notion.
Why carve granite? After I apprenticed for 4 years with the phenomenal sculptor Brian Goldbloom, the majority of my expertise was with sculpting site-specific public art in granite. It is an incredibly hard stone, which makes it brutal for the body that chooses to carve it. But at the same time, that hardness makes it durable. Granite erodes at a rate of 1 inch every 10,000 years. Making something, anything, in granite, demands that the viewer ask, why did they make this? The challenge alone stimulates the imagination. We look at Stonehenge and marvel, and make up stories for what possibly could have motivated its creators to endure such an enormous challenge. To imbue a sculpture with a message that together we can overcome enormous obstacles, and reach loftier goals, well, that’s worth a little bit of pain and sore muscles.