This was a commission piece I did for some dear family friends who live in Brown County, Indiana. Like all large cairns, it required a keen sensitivity to balance, with a large stone placed in the center as a counterweight to hold the construction together. These friends live on an incredibly beautiful patch of land, heavily wooded with a number of steep ravines. I spent hours wandering the woods for stones and carting them back through the forest in a wheelbarrow (my back has never been the same!).
For me, there’s something incredibly mesmerizing about cairns. They carry a sense of weight and power. They evoke the archetype of the sentinel, standing guard as a silent witness to the life of the land. My aim here was to punctuate the built environment with a visual reminder to return to that energy of steadiness, silence and presence.
(The song in this video is from an album I did a long time ago called Ebony Moon.)