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Souls in Stone
For a relatively short time in the late 1700’s, stylistic portraits of the deceased where carved on slate gravestones in New England. These image vary widely, ranging from the formal to the humorous. These stones will also typically have a narrative of the person, their life and sometimes, how they died. These features provide an insight into the person (or in some cases persons) buried there. In some cases the description can be informative and in others especially poignant, as many of the stones with portraits are of children.
As I visited many of the cemeteries near where I live in search of these portraits, I gained a deep respect for the lives these people lived and the tragedies many of them had to endure. As I went from stone to stone reading the stories and seeing the images carved in them, I felt that I was experiencing part of their lives and in someway mourning those long ago deaths.
By focusing on just the faces found on these “portrait stones” I try to capture the striking combination of beauty, oddity, grimness and whimsicality found in these carvings. As I made these images the idea that some flicker of emotion was present in them, as though the image carved was trying to make contact.