Jeremy Kester – Artist Spotlight

My journey through stone began by chance in 2002. I was up from Sacramento, California visiting my mother in Ashland, Oregon. She was designing a website for a small company producing what they described as “fine art furniture in stone and steel”. The owner came over for a design consultation and dinner one evening, and that is when I met Fred Null, a boisterous and eccentric artist who (for better or worse) changed the course of my life.

Fred told me about how he had abandoned his successful newspaper business and run off to Pietrasanta to learn to carve marble.  He spared no embellishments, dressing the experience of the sculptors apprentice in all the romance one might imagine.

Encountering the difficulties of actually making a living as a sculptor, he pivoted towards interior design and used his carving and art experience to produce a uniquely organic style of furniture. After he was finished regaling me with his storied past, Fred said that he could use a hand at the shop for a couple of days doing some basic clean-up for cash. Never being one to turn down work, I took him up on it, and the next day found myself in the middle of a giant mess of stone scrap, dust, and rusty metal. Those two days turned into a week, during which, a client submitted a large custom request. Fred didn’t have the production capacity to take it on, but in the true spirit of the starving artist he said yes anyways, and then threw the project at me. I had no Idea what I was doing. My initial training essentially consisted of:  “There’s the tools and materials. Try and make something that looks kinda like that over there. Go.” This was my introduction to carving stone, and I lived for quite a while with an angle grinder permanently attached to my arm.

In the years that followed at Null Designs in Stone (a company that turned out to operate very much like a pirate ship) we grew to the point where I was managing a production crew of 8 artists and taking projects from design through completion. It was an eye opening experience to do something creative for a living. Through my work with Fred I became introduced to several other stone sculptors and started learning more traditional hand carving techniques in marble and soft stone. When my time on the pirate ship Null came to an end, I set up a small carving studio in my basement and kept banging away. I was fortunate to have a roommate who was kind enough to remind me to also eat and bandage my hands. Eventually my creative energy shifted back towards music, which had been and still is a lifelong passion of mine, and the chisels went into storage for years. The music evolved into a profession in live sound, audio recording, and video production. I stayed in the world of audio/visual both performing and producing until around 2012. The work had become very editing-heavy, and I found myself spending way more time in a desk chair behind a computer than was healthy. I started thinking back on the crazy times in the dust and sparks, grinding on stone.

It was precisely at this time that Fred relocated his shop to Portland, Oregon, my new hometown of a couple of years, and reached out asking if I had interest in helping him get up and running. After reaching an agreement, one which gave me some assurance that I would never again feel the need to wake up at 5am and pull the spark plugs out of his truck to prevent him from becoming an impediment to critical production, I was once again carving stone. This decision followed my motto of “when provided with a choice, choose the weird”. This second ride proved as tumultuous as the first, but when it was once again time to part ways with Fred, this time I stayed with the stone and went on to work in many different corners of the stone trades. The trade work gave me a broad skill set and a good understanding of the treatment allowed by many different types of stone. It was during my time as a wire saw operator that I first worked with basalt, and discovered that its material properties really got me creatively inspired. The homogeneity of the stone and the ability to apply such a wide range of surface treatments, from a dark black polish to light grey textures, was very appealing. I started playing with the stone, getting familiar with its behavior, and sculptures started appearing. During this resurgent period of stone sculpting, I met M.J. Anderson at the Portland Art Museum and she turned me on to the Northwest Stone Sculptors Association. It still took me a few years to finally get to my first NWSSA symposium in 2016, which was also the last year at Camp Brotherhood in Washington. The learning experiences, friendships, and opportunities that have come out of my time in the NWSSA have helped to cement stone sculpting as the central focus of my life and now I’m in real big trouble.

My current work can be broadly classified as contemporary abstract. I am a very process driven direct carver working primarily in basalt and other hard igneous stones—mostly salvaged industrial byproducts. I have been developing a vocabulary of clean, fluid lines with sharp transitions, textural contrast, and fine finish. Typically I will start with very gestural sketching, either directly on the stone or on paper, not focused on a specific concept, but simply trying to feel the lines and physically connect with the form. For larger works, this initial concept will go through another step of design refinement to arrive at a fairly close idea of what the overall form will be, while still leaving me room to improvise as I get closer to the finished surface. I love the improvisational feel of direct carving. The aggressive rhythms of fret cutting with grinders and plunging diamond chainsaws through hard stones gives me a pleasure similar to that which comes from banging out loud heavy metal riffs on a cranked up electric guitar. I believe that a strong sense of rhythm during the carving process is crucial to making the experience enjoyable and those patterns are contained and conveyed in the finished work.

The sense of discovery pushes me further into the piece like an archaeologist slowly unearthing a mysterious object of unknown origin. I am not as much interested in trying to convey a specific concept as I am simply presenting an artifact out of time and place to be pondered. I would like my work to provide a placid refuge within which minds can wander in curiosity, or perhaps find some sort of meditative state. Through the process of carving, I am able to achieve a sort of neurochemical-cocktail-flow-state that is quite pleasant, and I want the work to crystallize that feeling so that it can be shared. And then, I hit my thumb with a hammer and snap right out of it.
  

As I continue my professional development, I find myself trying to expand both my artistic vocabulary and my technical skill set. I have been threatening to try and move some pieces in a more representational direction. It has also become obvious that, since the future will be dominated by robotic overlords, digital modeling and CNC programming are looking like functional necessities. I am petitioning for the day to be extended from 24 to 36 hours—that might give me enough time to get it all done.

That’s what it comes down to now. Time. The act of carving stone is the easy part. Carving out the time/space within which to sculpt is the real challenge. Every finished piece makes the next one more possible. It’s a matter of building and maintaining momentum. As the world seems busy simultaneously constructing prototypes of every possible apocalypse scenario, I will cure my idle hands in the dust.  Whether guided to it by passion or simply stumbled into, stone is in my life to stay.