Blair Woodland has long turned the ordinary into the extraordinary.
The dad-of-one from Cornwall quit his job as a pastry chef to become a stone mason ten years ago, swapping bags of sugar for stone walls and Cornish hedges across his home county.
More recently though, his goal has turned to taking his craft even further, transforming his stonework into art.
“I’ve always thought there’s so much more that can be done with stone,” he said.
His latest work is a huge stone sphere with a granite base and top and pizza-shaped slate in between (Image: Blair Woodland)
“I like building walls and I’m happy building walls, but I just feel there’s so much more you can do with it. It’s such an amazing material. It’s so unique and it’s everywhere as well. The possibilities are endless really, within the laws of physics.”
He added: “I like to keep it, as much as I can, how people in the past would have done it. I don’t really like using power tools – every now and then you have to – but I like just using hammers and chisels.
“It might take a bit longer but I like knowing that a lot of effort and love has gone into it.”
Blair’s latest work of art is a giant globe-shaped boulder, carefully handcrafted entirely from slate and granite.
The dad-of-one hopes to create more artistic pieces in the future (Image: Blair Woodland)
The piece, which took 290 hours to create in total and currently sits in Boscastle, is made up of ‘pizza shaped’ pieces of slate and is held up entirely by itself.
“ It’s very dry stone so there’s no cement or anything in there to hold it together,” Blair explained.
“It’s held together purely on the way it’s built – and gravity.
“ I have done some cool stuff in the past, but this is definitely the most unique arty sort of piece.”
Asked what went into the piece, he added: “There was a lot of work that went into it because to form the curves of the circle, each shape, like a pizza, if you can imagine, had to be dressed into sort of a wedge shape to work around the shape of the curves.
“So there was a lot of time just using hammers and hand tools to do that.”
The human element is something Blair, from St Teath, is aware could fade over time.
The stonemason creates a range of walls and Cornish hedges (Image: Blair Woodland)
And it’s something that was all too well highlighted during the recent A30 mishap, which resulted in kilometres of incorrectly built Cornish hedging collapsing.
“It was being done by people who weren’t really trained to do it,” Bair said.
“We get the same on all the housing estates that get put up now. It’s all about the money and how quickly it can be done – the end result doesn’t generally seem to be taken into account.”
He added: “Great Britain is built on stone, all our greatest buildings and churches, they’re all made out of stone. It would be such a shame if it just slowly died out.”
You can visit Blair’s website, here .
When it comes to stone, he says the possibilities are ‘endless’ – within the laws of physics (Image: Blair Woodland)
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