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FEATURE

Actress Angelina Jolie Bali

Nelson Mandela Mahatma Gandhi George Washington

contours of our own and micro organisms. “I
character,” he explains. leave the environment
Fragments of each exactly the way I found
subject’s life are known it, after all we visit the
to him, so he has a natural environment to
‘metaphysical collage’ commune with nature
of each person’s story and not be reminded of
and a record of their man’s interventions,” he
characteristics. People says, adding that his task
are often surprised is to imbibe the work
by the presence the with a soul; as Leonardo
portraits exude, and da Vinci said: “If there
how animated rocks is no spirit behind the
and stones can actually hand, there is no art.”
become.
Selecting pebbles
Tiring work Messiah William Shakespeare Currently, his body of
He says that the work contains over 100
process of creating a work in stone is humbling and tiring, as he portraits using millions of pebbles. Selecting exactly the right ones
spends hundreds of hours on his knees. The simplicity of the final for the scale and tone of the subject is essential. If the stones are too
outcome is deceptive, because it takes a huge amount of time large, then the final piece will not illustrate detail, too small and the
to conduct research, prepare colour swatches, collect stones, materiality of the stones becomes lost.
complete the work and then photograph it. Although he only uses These portraits are like fossils, temporarily framed in the sediment
a mobile phone to document his work, he does use a wide variety of of their time. He wanted to see if such a seemingly cold and
techniques to create it. dispassionate medium could express warmth, hope, joy, strength,
Each piece takes a few weeks or sometimes over a month to wisdom and kindness, and has been quietly amazed by the vast
complete, and can be re-made using different combinations of arrays of expression possible.
stones to find the most effective outcome. He then returns the stones
to their original disorder to cause the least disruption to local ecology Information and photos supplied by Justin Bateman. n

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