DAVID WADE

Awhile back I walked into a quarry at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. I spotted a large mound of oval shaped stones that were from one to three feet in diameter. An inquiry revealed that the stones had been deposited in that area by way of the last glacier. The stones were tumbled and scraped into ovaloid forms through the action of the glacier which left them looking like giant M&M’s or seed pods.

I selected a “pod” that was two feel long and about a foot thick and wide. Some of the color of the stone could be glimpsed through the incrustation of mud and pitting – it was pink crystal with a matrix of deep grey granite.

I started to form the piece with a grinder and diamond wheel. In short order I discovered that the pitting and irregularities were far more extensive than I had imagined. After three or or four more days of grinding, I decided that the form evolving was too simplistic; so I chose to revise the piece and to treat it as if it were a seed splitting just before the sprout pushed its way out.

In a sense, my work had only just begun. I worked for another ten days, fine sanding and polishing out the form. At last Genesis, the finished piece, emerged from the battered, tumbled, pitted stone. It suddenly occurred to me that the abstract characteristics of the piece could just as easily appear to be the unification of two similar forms instead of the division of one single.

One of the distinctions that evolves from simplified abstract forms is that they encourage the imagination of the observer to participate in the creative process.