The new week continues with hard work and plenty of dust, but we do have the most amazing blue sky to work under...

Here Raphael Beil cutting and chipping away in a cloud of dust.

Saturday, the weather turned absolutely awful, so we called it a day ( or a week...) after lunch. Here, Raphael Beil chipping away in the driving rain.

On Sunday, I caught some fish and explored the quarry, which spreads along this valley for miles. Some parts have been slowly taken back by nature, some are deliberately landscaped, so that nature can take over.

The first week of production is almost over, and this is pretty much what we do all day, cutting and chipping, to get the bulk of the granite off the form.

 Monday morning we started with the carving work. I prepared top and bottom projection templates  of the sculpture in my London studio, they were sprayed in the correct position onto the block. It gives a good idea where to start with the cutting.

Following that , it is just very hard graft. Cutting is done with an over sized diamond cutter, the blade is water cooled, the cuts are chipped of using a sledge hammer.
This is the toughest part of the production, it is brute force and endurance, and a real test of ones will...

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 This is the starting block for the sculpture, about 28 tons of Norwegian Larvekite granite.

 Raphael discusses the drilling procedure with one of the quarry workers.

Two corners are being drilled of the main block

The re shaped block is then transported 30 km to the work place at Tvedalen quarry.

The spring sunshine also brings the little creatures out...

On the 12th of April I left for Norway via Rotterdam and Bremen. I  had to take another ferry from Hirtshals/ Denmark to Larvik in Norway and arrived after 3 days here in the fjord.







Raphael Beil already prepared the site and infrastructure for the past 2 weeks , and he did a great job, as the task was enormous.

Pictures from the Staalaker quarry in Larvik, taken over the period from October 2014 to January 2015.It took a good 3 months to find a top quality block for my sculpture, but Lundhs, the Norwegian mining company, finally found a healthy block in January. Here, Thor Lundh, the quarry owner, with Raphael Beil, my assistant for this project.

Large slabs of granite are cut off using diamond wire cutters. The material has natural veins and faults, as I need an over sized block, it took a while to find the final block suitable for my sculpture.

This is a hydraulic drilling rig attached to a quarry digger to drill and pin the block into the correct size.

And this is where we will start our work. About 20 tons to remove.