Short Presentation for Dom.

Hi Dom I thought the easiest way to show a good cross-section of my work without clogging your in-box was to do a little on-line presentation.

Initial enquiries  have shown black granite to be drastically more expensive than I was expecting (£4000 for a piece of the size we’re after)

I am waiting to hear back from a company that deals with china.

I have reviewed the picture you sent me and seeing the detailed carving more clearly I am very confident to say that I can make a copy with even better fish.

I have deliberately made this presentation almost exclusively from pieces in slate.

All of these pieces are now years old and in excellent condition and hope to dispel your worries about it as a suitable material.

To put it in context  it used for the roofs of houses and there is even a trade in second hand roof slates, when houses are demolished the slates are saved and sold on for other houses.

It is and always has been used as stone for headstones and as such expected to last 100 years plus.

Most people concern comes from the worry of it splitting and I can say with the confidence of 10 years experience that that is a matter of quality and selection.

At the quarry I deal with in North Wales they are still bringing new stone to the mills for the production of roof slate. This is of the very highest quality and it is from this seam I would get a piece for you.

I would without hesitation give it 10 year guarantee, and with an agreed maintenance program to be carried out, then a lifetime guarantee.

There is the further advantages of  using  and supporting a British Based Industry and  the environmental impact of transport.

There is also the fact that I can go in person and make the selection myself.

The piece below was one of  12 installed in Porthcawl in a public park and paid for by the council. The piece was installed four years ago now, is still in perfect condition and had already been part of a quarry building for 80 years. Its strength is incredible, due its laminate nature, at 12 foot long and a mere 8 inches thick you could happily drive a car over it.

Even with cutting all these holes through and shaping the edges, the piece below is quite intact with no signs of any problems.

This one, as you can see, is not slate. I just wanted to show how well I can capture animals and scenes from nature.

I leave you with all that to ponder (I’ll get back to you with the price of a Chinese piece) and hope to chat it all over with you next week on the phone.

All the best Matthew.

Welcome to Dragonstone Carving – Home of the stone sculpture of Matthew Billington.

In this picture you can see me looking very pleased with myself having nearly completed the latest commission. The figure was delivered this Tuesday to its’ new home where it was received by equally pleased customers.

“I have just got back from Miami and just seen the statue in real life. Awesome piece of work, I’m extremley pleased with it and thinks its the best example I’ve seen. – Duncan Ellis.”

Big Arts Week Wales

During the ‘Big Arts Week Wales’ several years ago I went into one of the local junior schools for several days of voluntary work. This was my first experience of working in a school and getting a large group of kids carving stone. I needn’t have worried as I was met by a very supportive and innovative head-teacher. I was introduced to whole school during assembly and then shown through to the classroom where I was to be working.

After an hour or so of looking at my work on the computer and a small exhibition I had brought to the school we had a look at all the tools I had brought in. Passing them around we talked about how they were used and what they could do.

At this point there were already several boys and girls who wanted to be a stone carver when they grew up. You can imagine their response when I told them they could all work on their own piece for the school grounds. Some of them started to wonder if there was a connection with the small standing stone that had appeared in the school garden over the weekend.

So next came the design process and to make it clear that this was very much a group activity, that is both the drawing and the decision making, they all worked together on two long sheets of paper.

After a couple of hours of drawing we made a great big circle out of all the work and spent some time going round looking at all the designs. It came quite naturally to them to look for what they wanted as group, rather than champion their own picture. Some ideas were too fiddly,others didn’t fit the theme they had chosen (this was very dragon and tree related, which was natural for a Welsh school named for the Oak).

With the end of the first day looming decisions were made and a frenzy of chalk ensued with the design continuing to evolve as they went. After the school was cleared I used an angle grinder to cut all the major lines and cross-hatch anywhere a lot of stone needed to be removed. It is this process that really makes the carving of stone accessible to any age and ability. The issue of accuracy is solved by the outline being cut and the cross-hatching means the bulk of stone to be removed is weakened and just needs bashing.

Of course with a bit of practice and a lot concentration they improved very rapidly. By day three they were tackling tricky bits themselves, instead of getting me to do them, and doing them well. It was a delight to watch them all improve and get so much out of it.

The inclusive nature of the school meant that the children with special needs were equally able to enjoy the activity and all the children benefited from the challenge. When you break the whole process down it becomes quite complex, you have to hit one end of the chisel with hammer whilst the end is on the right spot with consideration of angle and direction to take into account whilst keeping to artistic aim in mind. Whilst concentrating on all this you have to remain aware of your neighbours head (and hammer). Of course it was my job to make sure that everyone has got enough space and experimentation was kept sensible. Well I’m pleased to report that there were no injuries, there was a surprise or two though

Of course if you make a portal stone to Dragon World you shouldn’t be surprised when dragons start laying eggs in the school garden.

The next was for me, although you also shouldn’t be surprised when kids come up with innovative new ideas without trying

Can we colour it in now?

I had to come up with a new technique pretty quick but the result was one we can all be proud of. Chatting with the head-teacher afterwards she said that kids had had an experience they would remember for the rest of their lives and we had created a school legend. She only wished she’d had a camera to capture the look of wonder on the face of the girl who interrupted her class to show her the dragon’s egg they’d just found in the garden.

Porthcawl Wilderness Park

This project was my biggest and best to date. The brief was to install three groups of standing stones to draw people through the main entrances of a large lakeside park in Porthcawl, South Wales.

First off was a visit to the quarry to see if they had anything big enough, actually more a case of ‘not too big, not too small’. As it happened the day we went up they were taking apart the base of an old winding shed. The stones were being handled by the biggest of JCB’s. Alan (slate surfer seen above) pointed out that 150 years ago when that structure had been built the stone was all moved by manpower (probably some Welsh Cob – One Horse Power as well) but basically rollers and levers.

The stones were selected and the lorry driven back down to the workshop. Unfortunately the 1960 Manatou Forklift doesn’t always feel like doing anything so myself and Jamie (above) did a bit of ‘levers and rollers’ ourselves sending this lump off the back of the lorry onto a pile of stone. I’m betting the victorian quarrymen would have loved to lay their hands on some sections of scaffold bar!

Along with quarry visits there were several site visits, council meetings and public consultation sessions. Most of the public consultation took the form of school visits, giving a presentation on stone carving, tool handling and big a screen show of my portfolio. This was all for the purpose of inspiring the kids to produce their own designs for the work that was going to go up in their local park. The drawings I took away from those two days translated directly (and unedited) into about 80% of the final content.

Then it was full steam ahead ‘No rest for the wicked’

Due to scale of the work there was a lot angle-grinding, air-hammer and die-grinder work involved (the die-grinder is a high speed air-powered spinning piece of tungten – great for smoothing and tidying large sections of stone).

Despite all the power tools I still needed a few little helpers.

Fine detail was still carved by hand and it was very important to me to represent the original drawing as honestly as possible. Avoiding the temptation to ‘improve’ the work.

Finally the big day came and for a few brief moments the huge immovable slabs, that had strained the forklift and blocked up the area outside my workshop for months, looked small as they dangled from the Hi-Ab. To our surprise the Hi-Ab operator was able to assure us that they were all less then a tonne.

All loaded and secured, I waved goodbye to four months work and wasn’t to see them again until they had become a towering part of the landscape.

Of course I hadn’t seen them standing until I got down their to clean and oil them and was pretty blown away by the experience. The only way to get the top areas done was to climb up the side of the stones using the knotwork borders for finger and toe holds.

Twelve months on the birds and the dogs had left their ‘marks’ but that was about it.

The whole project was about regenerating the park which had deteriorated with graffiti, arson and vandalism running in an escalating cycle. The more this happened, the less families and dog walkers came into the park and the worse it got.

On the last visit I made I found only two pieces of graffiti, one placed carefully and centrally in a panel I’d left blank (was decorative) the other was on the back and read “BOSS” which I took as a complement.

I put this down to the fact that many of the regular vandals would have had younger brothers and sisters involved in the project and some whose work was now permanently engraved on these 12 foot monoliths.

The work is above all accessible and (dare I say it) aesthetically pleasing, something which often seems to have been deemed unnecessary in public art these days. People are rightly upset by huge sums of money being spent on public art that is ‘bold and and challenging’ because it is actually ‘ugly and an eyesore’.

Footfall is now up, the public are venturing deeper into the park again and as a result vandalism etc is down. I met a mother with her two year old daughter who was pleased that she could now get her walk around the entire park, rather than  visiting just the swings and slide on the far edge, because she wanted to see the dragons and mermaids. Art really can be good for your health.

Result!

A Woodland Teaching Area.

I thought for my first proper post it would be interesting to follow a piece from start to finish.

This is where it all starts at the Llechwedd Quarry (pron. cleckwuth) in North Wales. A place to make you feel very small. Still actively pulling new slate out of the ground, I select my material from the waste not suitable for roof slates. As such all the slate I use is deemed recycled (even by the Revenue who don’t tax it).

Having got back to the workshop the fun begins. The foreman at quarry, Glyn, split out a piece just over a metre sq and about two inches thick. I then scribed out a circle a metre in diameter and cut it out with the big grinder. The design was decided,

and drawn onto the stone. Time to make some mess and noise!

Bit by bit

the stone is removed. In this case, a bass-relief, the surrounding stone is removed leaving the design standing proud.

The tool marks are all polished off and after a good clean the stone is oiled to really bring out the depth of colour.

Here’s the finished piece in situ, the centre piece to a woodland teaching area in Porthcawl. The circle was extended out to five metres in six spiral arms of three different stones around which the seven ‘henge-like’ benches were installed. Some of the benches were engraved with Viking motifs, remembering their activities in the area.