Editor’s note: In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
Take Vermont’s most prosaic and prolific ingredient, mix it with equal parts artistic inspiration and bone-crushing labor, and then spice it with gravity-defying whimsy.
That’s the remarkable recipe that Thea Alvin has been cooking up for 30 years. And somehow the flavor keeps getting more delightful and satisfying, which is no small accomplishment considering Alvin works with stones. Plain old rocks. Boulders. Fieldstone.
Actually, “works” doesn’t do it justice. She creates with stone, bends it to her will and imagination, twists it, turns it, spins it into eye-catching, improbable shapes, taking our landscape’s most elemental pieces and lofting them as if they were nature’s snap-to Legos – albeit Legos weighing 50 or 100 or 200 pounds that will crush unwary fingers (something she’s experienced). Why does she do this?
“I practice stonework because it makes me happy,” is her simple answer.
How she came to work in what has traditionally been a man’s field is anything but simple. How she came to transcend the boundaries of the traditional stone-layers craft – creating free-standing arches and circles and balancing cairns – is a story of an artistic career derailed and delayed that eventually could not be suppressed. Or as she puts it, she finally found her career “when the artist in me came out of the box.”
Her early life is soap opera fodder – communes, hanging with the Grateful Dead, smashing up a car, shuttling between her divorced parents, elopement at 18 and pregnancy – and was lively chronicled in a New York Times story. Suffice to say island life on Martha’s Vineyard with her father felt stultifying, especially being conscripted to help him in his work as a mason.
At the age of 16, she found herself forced to earn her keep as his assistant, as the mule hauling stones and bricks for chimneys and fireplaces. It was brutal hot work. “I really resented it. As a 16-year-old I ran and ran all day long, and I wasn’t paid,” she says. But that unwilling apprenticeship taught her perseverance, she admits, and how to do hard labor. Her seduction in stone and art, however, would have to wait.
“I had visions of going to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) when I was in high school. I was very artsy,” she says. But eloping and having three kids and coming up to Vermont as a single mom buried that hope, well, like a ton of bricks.
“My dream of being an artist got stopped. Being an artist, being anything other than being a mother, was not possible,” she explains.
As her children grew older, though, she eventually got back to work doing landscaping and some stonework. In her early 30s, she entered a sculpture competition in Burlington, though “I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do.”
She ended up studying arches and after some trial and rock-collapsing error, figured how to build them. The rest is history, writ in stone across the continent and abroad, often combined with teaching the stoneworkers art. She has left her stone signature in China and England, Canada and France and Mexico and all across the U.S., and in a historic Italian stone village near Varese in the alpine foothills north of Milan. (Photos and details at www.myearthwork.com).
Recently, she was profiled for Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, but spend some time with Alvin, and it’s clear all this publicity has not gone to her head (speaking to a visiting friend, she dismisses the idea of publicists and “media manipulation.”) Though she is widely traveled and does her art in tony places such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Boulder, Colorado, pull into her yard a couple miles south of Morrisville on Route 100, and you’ll find a very laid-back Vermont scene. There’s an old 1810 barn that is her new studio gallery and a compound that is a unique mashup of Old MacDonald’s farm, a hippie commune and an artist colony. She herself is not exactly sure what it is, admitting, “it’s a little tricky.”
The theory, she explains, is communal living with everyone contributing, which right now means five people, among them her partner, Michael Clookey, who is a sculptor, and her daughter Robyn. Chickens and goats roam, and to let you know this is no ordinary farm, along with the head-turning 35-ton stone composition in her front yard called “Triple Helix,” which snakes across the grass as it spins three coils into the air, there’s a dying butternut tree festooned with old bicycles. Whether that’s Alvin‘s humor or art may depend on one’s view.
As if to punctuate the point that her brain takes the earthbound and mundane and soars with it, the name of her gallery “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is composed of scrolled wood letters dotted with what turn out to be shiny beer bottle caps.
But back to her life with the stones. She talks about her relationship with them as something almost mystical. Stones speak to her, she is their translator and interpreter, and their medium, carrying out their weighty message.
“It’s a very spiritual, earthy whole process, because you’re creating and you’re using one of the most primitive materials,” she explains. Her satisfaction comes in “bringing all these pieces together into this one wall,” while the art comes into play in the transcendent shapes into which she wills the stone.
“I love for stone to look like it’s water, to look like it can flow,” she says, adding that it feeds the human urge to “challenge ourselves with things we think are impossible.”
The practical and physical side of her art – all self-taught – is just as remarkable as the whirls and arches she creates. It takes extensive skill and practice to manipulate and fit stones, knowing how to use levers and stone chiseling hammers (she has dozens, painted pink so they don’t get lost). To create her circles and arches, she taps into Fibonacci math ratios to ensure her designs are stable and feasible, supporting them with wooden framing until the final keystone locks all the stones in place and the frame can be removed.
As she creates, Alvin wades through tonnage like so many grains of sand. She just finished a “moongate” in Marion, Illinois, creating a wall and central circle that used 45 tons of stone. It took her just four days. She dispensed with 90 tons of stone for a wall and circle at Duke University, 400 tons in a stunning chapel and walled garden she built in Morristown. As she puts it, “Size matters – I love big sculpture.”
Yet Alvin herself? She’s small and compact, with small hands, intensely defying the stereotype of stoneworkers as tall burly men with large mitts. But in today’s parlance, she has a strong “core” and is every bit the endurance athlete, able to pick up 200 pounds of stone and slide it into place, enthralled by the process of “destroying stone, smashing stone, tiring your body by moving tons of material.”
Working at her creations, she says she gets in a stone zone, and never has to think which piece goes where; she just knows what will fit just by looking at.
“When I’m on the wall, it’s very hard to get me off the wall,” she says.
“People have said I’m a stone whisperer, which is funny, because I’m certainly not, but I do understand their language.”
Andrew Nemethy is longtime journalist, writer and editor from Calais, Vermont. He can be reached at Andrewnemethy@gmail.com
