Dramatic art in the wild
Artist Joe Smith uses drystone walling techniques to transform pieces of slate into sculptures which work in harmony with the landscape
In the far north-west of Scotland, rough-hewn stone steps cut into a wild and windswept hillside. They lead upward to a massive spherical sculpture. Six feet (2m) in diameter, it is fashioned from approximately 3,000 pieces of Caithness slate, woven together in 80 layers. Sunshine picks out a warm patina of weathered russet browns among the stones. However, when the sky is overcast and forbidding, grey-blue hues predominate and the sphere seems at one with its rock-strewn background. It weighs 7½ tons, yet looks precariously perched and ready to roll down the hill at any moment towards the sparkling waters of Lochan an Ais far below. Built in 2001, it has become a much-loved feature of the Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve in Ross-shire. The Tilted Globe, as it is known, was entirely built on location, the creation of artist Joe Smith. It was commissioned by Scottish Natural Heritage as part of a trail to highlight the work of geologists Ben Peach and John Horner. Part of Knockan Crag, known as The Moine Thrust, caused great controversy among scholars and geologists because of its seemingly impossible layering of younger sedimentary rock underneath much older metamorphic strata. In 1907, Peach and Horner confirmed the revolutionary theory that the formation had been caused by massive movements of the Earth’s crust.
Joe’s layered slate works were deemed highly appropriate for the area. This was to prove one of the toughest assignments in his long career. “It was an awkward place to work,” he recalls. “I made a raised timber walkway to the lower side of the site. We had to have my materials brought up by helicopter, and I started it during the winter of the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001. It was as cold as I have ever experienced, and I had to leave the job half-finished when the area was closed off during the cull. I returned in the summer to complete the piece when it was absolutely midge-infested. Overall, it was not an easy job, but it was the most beautiful place to work.” Joe has been fascinated by slate and stone since he was a child living in the Yorkshire Dales. “I come from just north of Hebden Bridge, and we lived right at the top of the Calder Valley,” he says. “There had been a big drift of people away from the land during the wars. All the farms on the side of the valley were empty and becoming derelict, with sheep running all over the ruins. If you ever wanted a bit of stone or slate, there was plenty just lying about. When I was 12, I built a stone henhouse with a slate roof for 10 Rhode Island Red chicks. It was essentially just a box with a door for me to get in and a bolthole for the hens. The slating wasn’t perfect, but the hens loved it.”
A love of stone
The Pennine countryside of Joe’s childhood is lined with a tracery of drystone walls, which have been built by craftsmen for at least 5,000 years. He was curious from the start to learn how such beautiful and durable structures were made. “My father showed me the rudiments of working with stone. I also learned from an old shepherd who went round the land repairing some of the walls in a bid to keep the sheep roughly where he wanted them to be. He told me: ‘One on top of two and two on top of one’, and that’s really the basic principle.” Aged just 15, Joe left Yorkshire to attend the Barony College in Dumfries to study agriculture. He was there for a year before taking milking jobs for the next two years, but his love of stone kept coming to the fore. “At night, I used to go out and fill gaps in the walls round the fields, just for the joy of doing it, because I didn’t get paid,” he says. “Then one farmer decided I was actually pretty good, so he offered me £5 to rebuild a dilapidated wall. It was days and days of work, and I had to cart a lot of stone in my old Mini, but I really enjoyed it. Then a professional waller came to the farm on a pheasant shoot and said he would give me a job if I ever wanted one. I decided I would rather set up on my own, so I chapped on a couple of farmers’ doors and put an advert in the paper, and that was it. I was off and running. Good grants were available at the time for agricultural drystone walling, so that encouraged the farmers to have it done.” At a conservative estimate, Joe believes that he moved at least 40,000 tons of stone over the following 25 years, repairing old walls and creating new ones. In time, horticulturalists and designers started to realise the benefits of drystone. Increasingly, Joe found himself called upon to work in gardens as well as on farms. He also tackled the more architectural challenge of building stone frontages for houses. He had no special training or qualifications for this, relying instead on the skills he had learned from bricklayers and masons. His progression from utilitarian walls to aesthetic sculptures was a gradual one, with the two careers overlapping for some time. Joe says his work has been a progression, not towards a particular goal, but following his instinct. He has done what interested him most at the time while always respecting the need to make a living. Even in his early walling days, though structural integrity was obviously vital, it was never enough to satisfy his aims. He always felt the need to make his work pleasing to the eye as well. He says his work choices have always sought in some degree to be a synthesis of both craft and art. His first venture into working with slate, apart from the childhood henhouse, began circa 1996 when he made small bowls to hold daffodil bulbs. The work was satisfying, but not
“The block... perhaps, Was once selected as the corner-stone Of that intended Pile, which would have been Some quaint odd plaything of elaborate skill” William Wordsworth, ‘Inscriptions Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone Here’
commercially viable. Then he realised he could build bigger items in the same time, which would be unique and exclusive.
Working with slate
Joe created his first major slate sculpture in 1997 when he built a vase, 5ft (1.5m) in height and nearly 3ft (1m) at the shoulders, in the garden of the Dumfriesshire cottage which has been the family home since 1982. It was a surprise silver wedding present for his wife, Elizabeth. He followed drystone principles to make it, so that the strength of the structure came from the interlocking slates and not from any kind of mortar binding them together. Now, the garden holds approximately 40 of his works, including a round, well-like basin holding dogwood stems instead of water. There are numerous vases, ranging in height from 2-8ft (0.5-2.5m), a 4ft (1.2m) high perfume bottle with a spherical stopper, pears of various sizes and a small apple. “You start off with a pile of stone essentially,” he says. “You’ve got the initial block and split it down to the thickness you want with your tools but, ultimately, the skill of drystone walling is the co-ordination of hand and eye. You see a piece, and you know it’s right for the bit you’re working on. There’s a fallacy that a good dyker never puts a stone down, but I believe it’s better than putting it in the wrong place. Sometimes, I will take two or three off and substitute different ones. “I used a lot of basic drystone principles when I turned to slate but, in a way, I had to stand all I had learned on its head. For example, a dyker would never build a wall that gets fatter towards the top, and would never use thin material. So, in that sense, I’m doing both things wrong, but making them right.” Those same principles were challenged anew when Joe hit on the notion of what was to become one of his main signature works, the tilting sphere. “I had bought a piece of land in Dumfriesshire and, with the aid of local tradesmen, I slowly built three houses. It was a high-visibility site, so when it came to landscaping, I wanted to place a particularly striking example of my stonework there. “I had this idea of creating a globe, tilting as the world does, on an axis of approximately 23 degrees. I felt that would give it an extra dynamic. When it was complete, I asked a wagon driver with a high-up mounted crane to tilt it for me. However, before he arrived, I decided to have a go myself with a complicated arrangement of levers and props, and it worked. When the driver arrived, he thought it had fallen over, and I had to stop him from lifting it back up again.” The angle is not a critical element of the tilting spheres, because Joe prefers to work to what is best for the particular location. He aims for between 17 and 23 degrees, using blocks where he wants the sphere to stop when he is turning it. For the sake of safety, they have a cement core.
Inside and out
A huge, airy shed at the bottom of his garden provides workshop space for the smaller sculptures. It is also home to his four-wheel drive workhorse and trailer, as well as a pallet scale. This is used for weighing loads of slate to ensure they do not exceed permitted transport limits.
Larger works are done in situ, however, not least because the sheer weight of the finished sculptures would make it both difficult and costly to transport them any distance. Working on location also lets him get a feel for the surroundings and an understanding of how his creation will become part of its environment. Most of his works are in private gardens, but examples are found in country estates and public spaces, such as Threave Gardens in Dumfriesshire and Alnwick Gardens in Northumberland. He also has a trio of Welsh slate vases in the meadow of Prince Charles’ Highgrove home. Joe’s workplace is rarely the same two weeks in a row, and prevailing weather conditions are almost irrelevant. “You just have to get on with the job,” he says. “We do have a barbecue shelter we put up if we are working with cement, because it can make an awful mess if it’s rained on. But if it’s drystone, it won’t take any hurt, and it’s hard luck if we get wet.”
Family collaboration
For the last four years, Joe has worked with the youngest of his three children, 28-year-old arts graduate Jenny. She had helped out on several commissions, then after completing her degree in Dundee, decided to work with him full-time. “I’ve done my apprenticeship as I’ve been working,” she says. “I was, and still am, slower than Dad, but I learn as I go along. I think the thing that took me longest was working out the best edge to use on the slate and the best grains. You have to learn to work with what you’ve got, and that includes any faults.” A number of Jenny’s own artworks are displayed on the walls of her parents’ home. She particularly loves painting large, colourful florals. They seem far removed from the sculptures she is creating now, but she finds great satisfaction in slate. “When we go to the quarries to make our selection or see a pile of split slates lying rough on the trailer, it can be quite hard to imagine where it’s going to go. But when you see what we can turn it into, and the transformation into some really soft and flowing shapes, I think that’s quite awesome.” To cope with the physical demands of the labour involved, Jenny does a lot of aerial hoop work and pole fitness, both of which improve upper body strength. “When I first started, I would get a lot of aches and pains in my hands and wrists,” she says. “I wore supports for a while, but I have found I don’t need them now.” Working with slates can be hazardous, with minor cuts caused by rough edges almost inevitable. Protective gloves are essential, but for Jenny they have proved elusive. “It’s still not easy to get the right kind of gloves in women’s sizes,” she says, and I’ve never been able to find a waterproof pair like Dad uses.” Tools can also be hard to find. Joe and Jenny use lump hammers and fine chisels for splitting, or riving, the initial slab into slates, but most modern tools are not hard enough for the job. Until recently, Joe had his chisels made for him by Shetlandbased blacksmith Bruce Wilcock, but he has now retired. ‘“Chisels nowadays tend to be tungsten-tipped, when what you really want is a fine steel edge. You need a good old-fashioned blacksmith to temper them,” he says. “Bruce made them out of ships’ engine bolts, so you had good steel to start with, but tempering is an art that’s dying out. Another blacksmith did try to make a chisel for me, but it wasn’t successful. So I’m not sure where I will go next.”
Working together
The time it takes to complete a piece depends on its size and the thickness of the chosen slate. A 5ft (1.5m) tall sphere generally takes four to five days. The heaviest of his creations to date is a 10ft ball weighing approximately 32 tons, situated in the gardens of a private house in Northumberland. “The type of slate we use depends on customer preference, availability and what will be most appropriate in the given area,” says Joe. “Some works call for a rougher texture; others need a thinner and smoother slate. “In my drystone walling background, we were paid piecework; not by the day, but by how much we had done. The last thing a dyker wanted was very thin stone because they would make slow progress. There’s still a bit of me that likes to work with thicker slate, but really the most important thing for me is variation in the weave. I have seen spheres created by other sculptors which are perfectly even, with flat uniform edges, but I believe that robs the piece of character. I prefer the irregularity. You have to use a bit more ingenuity when the slates are of different size and thickness.” Whether they are making a sphere, a vase, or even a chessboard piece, Joe and Jenny work on opposite sides of the sculpture. They gradually work round to meet one another, regularly checking each other’s side to ensure the piece is all going to come together as planned. “When you’re working on something round, there’s that one bit of slate which will complete the circle, and that’s always the most difficult one,” says Joe. “With the others, you may have a bit of leeway, but that last one has to perfectly fill the gap.” Seeing the result of their creative labours in just the right
location clearly means a great deal to both father and daughter. “Slate is such a natural material that it’s not really out of place anywhere,” says Joe. “Some people want their sculpture in the middle of a lawn as a statement piece. My personal preference is to have them among foliage as part of a whole. At the end of the year when the foliage dies down, the sculpture takes precedence, and it’s a nice thing to look at over the winter. Then, in summer, the flowers come up and the sculpture plays second fiddle, but I enjoy that aspect as well. “There’s a tremendous satisfaction in building a beautiful curvaceous sculpture from a pile of slate. To see it growing and then to have the completed work, often in a lovely garden, gives me great pleasure. Hopefully, it will look as if it has always been there. I like to see what I have achieved in my work, so I count myself to be very fortunate.”
CONTACT www.joe-smith.co.uk Prices for slate sculptures start at £350 for the smallest pieces. A 5ft high creation is £2,000-£3,000.