This was a week marked by quarry visits in the Alpi Apuane
Keara McMartin, co-director at Studio Sem, has been for some weeks in the exacting and laborious process of sourcing a particular block of marble for the German sculptor Dirk Wilhelm (pictured below).
The sculpture will be a large piece for a public area and, as it is going to be worked, cut into sections and re-aligned, it must be made from one block so that the grain and veining are consistent in the final work.
The November floods had made transporting blocks from the mountains down to Carrara and on very nearly impossible. And the main business of the quarries, selling blocks for cladding, flooring etc to the construction industry, meant that orders were backing up. Marble for sculpture is only one part of the quarry's income so it is, understandably, somewhere on a list of priorities rather than, as we would all like to think, at the top.
As the roads are cleared and the cavatori (quarry workers) get back to work, Dirk is doing what sculptors do when they might otherwise be kicking their heels...making something else.
Into all this step Keara
She has to ensure that Dirk gets the perfect block and is realistic about what the quarry, given the pressures, can provide, and when. She also has to get a guarantee from the quarry that, should the block be faulty, they will replace it. I start to realise just how key Keara is to all this...the behind the scenes stuff.... and so when she asked whether I would like to accompany her and Dirk on a visit to Franco Petacchi's quarry for a marble inspection, I jumped at the chance.
Franco Petacchi features earlier in the blog, or at least his studio does (he has both studio and quarry just up from Carrara). Ekkehard Altenburger carved his House of the Gordian Knot there....and Ekkehard was full of praise for how much care Franco had taken in selecting his block.
Keara and Franco
Cavatori are notoriously tough people. The work has mostly been in families for generations and they are fiercely independent. Franco is wearing dark glasses because a steel pressure cushion (used as support spacers while extracting the blocks from the hill) burst in his face a few weeks ago.
Although I had intended this photograph to be an admittedly rather cruel contemporary pop portrait of Mick Jagger, it is one of the discarded cushions....it is made of sheet steel so you can imagine the kind of pressure needed to inflate it...and the kind of damage it might do if it explodes.
So faced with a partially cut out mountain like this
(one day all this will be bathrooms)
how do you get at the blocks?
Well this is how.
You chainsaw in parallel to the floor at about skirting board level. Then you drill holes at each far corner from the top. Feed a flexible saw-blade down one of the holes, then out to the front face through the chainsawed gap. Join the saw blade up and feed it through a drive (not unlike the method used by brain surgeons to make access panels in the skull). This makes the side cut. Repeat on the other side and then the same with the back. Pull it out and cut it to size using the same flexible saw method illustrated below. The saw blades (cooled by jets of water) are just below the red lines and the drive is the box on the right. Notice that the drive engine is on rails to maintain the saw tension.
And then comes the lifting and transport. This clip gives you an idea of the weights involved..
In front of the stubborn block. I like this picture because I don't think I look like the softy I felt I was among the cavatori
Keara and Franco explaining quarrying to me...
.....and cavatori preparing for the next phase of cutting
With Keara and Franco..I love this picture. It is a thank you picture.
I left in awe of the cavatori, the ability of Keara and Franco to read the marble in the mountain and the severed landscape which, at the risk of being environmentally unfashionable, I found beautiful. The geometric forms cut out of the jagged mountainside made, to me, a beautiful contrast. And without wishing to stray into the realms of aesthetic wankdom, the flayed rock created a kaleidoscope of visual effects which I found mesmerising.
That said, there are serious environmental issues afoot, of which I know little, that deserve a mention.
It is an ineluctable fact that if you keep taking 3 x 1.5 x 1.5 m blocks of rock out of a mountain, one day you will not have a mountain. And then what happens to all those patterns that nature has established over millions of years?
The best I can do is point you at studies, and both established and incipient campaigns.
You will find relevant links in this post at the ever-informative and up-to-the-minute local English language blog Art is Life
Later in the week I visited two quarries up from Serravezza. The marble up there is, I believe, called Cardoso. Remote and fantastical places these quarries
The ceiling of an access tunnel that once grounded where the faced rock gives way to crag in the picture.
View up one of the holes drilled to feed the saw blades through..dia approx 10 cm.
The stocking seam line is, I assume, from the first turn of the flexible blade before it tensed and bit into the upper part of the tunnel hole. However, I cannot explain the dog leg about 3/4 of the way up.
The area silhouetted by blue sky would once have been rock..
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