Pictures: Jason working outside his studio.

Your studio is fascinating; it’s surrounded by interesting buildings. It’s also very bare and monochromatic compared with most art studios.

It doesn’t bother me what my studio looks like; I create so much dust that it’s hard to keep anything clean. Mostly it’s to keep my tools dry and safe.

It’s also quite isolated. Is that how you like to work?
I have a regimented working day. Setting up takes up to an hour and then I will work until to 12.30, have lunch and go on until five. It then takes about an hour to pack away again so my actual working time is precious. It helps to be focused but I always have time for visitors!

I see you are working outside today- do you always work outside?
I prefer to work outside. In summer I’m out all day. Winter’s the same but I’m in my woolly hat and North Face jumpers! It’s not so bad when you are working because you are moving about. By the time you add ear defenders, gloves and a coat it’s OK even when it’s really cold.  The carving can become very meditative and you can block out any discomfort.
In winter I do miss the light. It affects how you look at work when it is outdoors. Natural daylight is somehow more honest.

Is all your work now site – specific?
My public art pieces are. My own work is driven by investigations around natural forms and then they will get exhibited back in the natural arena; so I am putting them back into that natural environment.
By using the intimations of the landscape and nature’s essential structures there becomes a necessary grounding in my search for form. I am also asking people to make connections with their immediate environment.
Public artwork requires a different approach, it has to consider and work with architecture and other man made forms.

When you do work for an urban space do you find your forms become more angular?
More and more contemporary architecture is becoming increasingly sculptural, softer and with less angular lines. I like to mix elements of both. I like the element of construction as well as the delicacy you can sometimes perfect in smaller pieces.

How small do you work?
In models the size varies from about 20cm upwards and for gallery work if its plinth based from 40-50cm upwards.
Sometimes I will make a piece of work just determined by the shape of the stone block. I don’t have a formula for making commercial work. I like to use as much of the stone block as I can.

When I first started I used the off- cuts from other carvers work. It was the only way I could source materials. Even now I will re-use and I will salvage from skips when I visit quarries. The quarries make their profit from the building trade and their unwanted stone usually goes to landfill. 

Tell me about starting out…..
In 1994 I was in my second year of my art degree when I volunteered to work as an assistant to Hamish Horsley on Durham Cathedral for six weeks. Working on site there I began learning processes of carving and developed a real feeling for working with stone as a material.
Back at college a new tutor made us look at installation art and its contextualisation and by my degree show I felt confident enough to produce a body of work in an installation context using carvings which were soft, malleable forms accompanied by poetry texts in bronze. It was a difficult decision to make to continue to work in stone at the time, as students were discouraged from such traditional sculptural materials.
I just found the whole research around the geology, the quarry, methods and means enjoyable…I have stayed there really. It’s the grounding for what I am doing at the moment.

What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on a Public Art Commission for North Belfast, Northern Ireland.
It’s a piece of sculpture commissioned to celebrate the linen industry that was in North Belfast.
I do find it challenging and exciting to be given a brief to work to. I enjoy collaborating with the client- with their ideas. You are the creative person who is needed to share their ideas and then having exchanged ideas to produce something for them. I like that.
The Irish work will be a two and half metre high stone cone derived from the shape of the old sewing bobbins.
Six segments of the cone will be assembled and they will be twisting upwards in a winding motion to echo a manufacturing stage called ‘Winding the Warp’. Its on scheduled to be finished by the end of September.

You took part in South East Open Studios again this year. Do you find having visitors helps with your practice?
It’s now my fourth year with the South East Open Studios and I have found being involved a very invaluable experience I normally operate as a ‘working’ open studio. Not only have I been able to show the work in its various stages of completion but it also allows the public to get a glimpse of all the other pieces that never made it!

Interview by Franny Swann. SEOS Chairman