“Technology is so advanced, and you can do anything with a computer,” Fullingham, the director and lead carver for this year’s Bloomington Limestone Symposium, said. “But the skill and the art of carving limestone and bringing it to life needs to be passed on.”
In order to do just that, Fullingham and some of the other symposium members kicked off Limestone Month with a hands-on exhibit at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology on Friday.
“I think when the kids come and see what we’re doing and try their hand at it, that will spark their interest,” Fullingham said. “They’ll start seeing it around town and saying ‘Oh, well I learned about that at the WonderLab.’”
Carvers stood by blocks of the familiar gray stone with chisels and hammers in hand. Children who attended put on safety goggles and chipped away at the rock, roughly carving their initials. If they preferred an easier medium to work with, they had the option of going inside and carving up a block of soap.
Though it can’t compete with soap, the artists said that limestone is one of the easiest rocks to sculpt with.
“It’s so uniform,” Fullingham said. “It hasn’t been heated and pressurized like marble. It just settled down, so you can carve in any direction you want. There aren’t big hard or soft veins going in any one direction.”
Andrea Oeding, an assistant gallery manager at the museum, said statements like this one are the reason why they’ve hosted the Science of Art program every year since 2012.
“What’s exciting is that when a lot of the sculptors and other artists come in and are talking about their work, they’re actually talking about science without even knowing it,” Oeding said.
As a part of the downtown Bloomington First Friday program, the museum has a different group of artists come in and organize hands-on activities the first Friday of each month in the summer.
This year, the museum will also host aerialists and molding and casting artists.
Carving at the WonderLab marks the start of the Limestone Symposium, a month-long event where Limestone artists from across the country gather to learn and carve together. They come from as far as New Mexico, California and Rhode Island.
“It’s important because the natural resource that we have here is part of the fabric of American history and memory,” Amy Brier, the symposium’s founder, said. “I carve it, so I want it to be celebrated and recognized.”
For many of the carvers, limestone is more than just a medium to carve in.
“It’s just a great metaphor for life,” Fullingham said. “It’s good to you, if you’re good to it. It carves beautifully, it responds to a loving touch, and it’s warm. It has so much life in it for being an inanimate object.”
