dry stone egg sculpture

by | May 23, 2021 | Stone Art and Lithadelic Sculpture, storytelling and lore | 0 comments

Devin Devine, stone sculptor based out of  Pennsylvania

Sculptures built and delivered across the USA

dry stone egg

The Story of Panku, first being to emerge from the Cosmic Egg

In the very beginning there was a Cosmic Egg. The first entity to emerge from this Egg was like a man, but semi beastly, brutish and hairy. His name was Panku and he emerged from the Cosmic Egg and soon set about the business of creating the world. For this task, our beast of a man did have a hammer, and with this hammer, the Hammer of Panku, he did set about shaping, fashioning and constructing the world in which we now live.
A calm and patient artisan….it is somewhat unclear why the stories tell of him as part-beast. Perhaps he was a gentle and sensitive entity….as the beauty of our world suggests that he must have been….but despite this sensitivity, he just happened to be hairy. Or maybe Panku was really Pan—and really did have the legs of a beast. But despite the beauty he carved into our world, he left the task incomplete. This is why there are problems and needless suffering in the world: its construction was never completed and as such, it just doesn’t function properly, much of the time.
Some say he gave up, or got tired or frustrated with the task of world making. Hey, once I knew a guy who gave up building his house, when it was half-way complete. These things happen. And so Panku did toss his hammer aside…somewhere he sits now in a pagoda probably, straight chillin’. The world was halfway finished, but it already had grapes and women and music so…..time for a break!
Or did he lose the hammer accidentally? In any event, the hammer was lost or forgotten and this is the quest now: find the Hammer of Panku. You’ll have to spend years seeking it out there, even though it was inside you all along. You still have to go out seeking, to find it.
Find the hammer of Panku. You, Hammer Heart, let the hammer forever live within your breast, every heartbeat a gentle hammer strike, urging you forward. Go now, and help create the world.

 

dry stone egg sculpture

Newly completed commissioned piece: the dry stone egg with color gradient. My goal here was to create as subtle a transition as possible, from purple/lilac base to gray/blue top.

My customer is an avid bird watcher and avian enthusiast. Having seen my spheres and vases, she asked me if I could create an egg for her. Of course I could–but let me do something interesting with the color arrangement…

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egg cairn

completed here in PA and on its way to upstate New York

I get asked all the time–you build cairns, right?

The best answer I can usually come up with is….sort of! I consider cairns to be a rustic tradition. Who uses a hammer on a cairn? As such, I usually call these stacked stone, or dry stone sculpture. Or natural material assemblage`, if I just happen to feel the need to interject some artsy french words into the talk. These may be built in situ (see what I just did there?) or, like this egg here, they can be built remotely at my workshop and then wrapped up very carefully and delivered.

In addition to rusticity, modern cairns also tend to be ephemeral. My works are intended as permanent and this piece does have a small amount of well-hidden mortar, to help make it portable and to protect from vandalism. For this reason, I started referring to my works usually as “stacked stone sculptures”, rather than “dry” stone sculptures a few years back.

Pagoda Cairn, adjacent to a garden path installation in New York state.

Related content: stone path with ramps, cairns and mosaic elements

Nothing wrong with cairns, they are great too. It’s sort of out of respect to the tradition of cairn building, that makes it difficult for me to call these sculptures as cairns. Each and every piece of stone has been hammered, chiseled, saw-cut, torched and kissed before being added to the overall structure. Okay, in reality I only torched 2 of these stones. But still.

egg cairn

 

more stone arts by Devin Devine:

 

serious inquiries, contact devin@devineescapes.com

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