Think about it: 120 tons of stone.
That’s how much — six full tractor-trailer flatbed loads — sculptor Tim de Christopher had shipped to Franklin County back in 1993 from a stone yard supplying the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which he’d worked on.
It’s no surprise that anyone who thinks that big and creatively would arrive in Turners Falls in 2001 with a vision of a massive “Cathedral Project” largely inspired not only by his adopted village’s church spires but also its massive mill buildings.
Now , the 63-year-old artist, a Cooper Union-trained artist who’s spent his career sculpting gargoyles and original artworks, has been raising money for a long-term re-imaging of that colossal project — his “Will and Testament” — in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Jan. 1 birth of his toy-inventor father.
Using the remaining 30 tons of the original stone, de Christopher conceives of his largest, final undertaking as being spread over a roughly 3,200-square-foot site surrounding his Second Street studio in Turners Falls.
It is “the focus of my work for the foreseeable future,” he declares in his “100 Loaves” Kickstarter campaign, already garnering three times its $1,000 goal. Prizes for the campaign are de Christopher’s stone-carved artisan bread loaves — in the playful style of the artist whose “Rock Paper Scissors” was installed downtown last June, and reminiscent of the bread-loaf bench he created for the former Ristorante DiPaolo on Avenue A.
“I gotta build something like they never got ’em in the world,” he says, quoting “the driving motto of one of my heroes,” the late Simon Rodia, who created the Watts Towers installation in Los Angeles that de Christopher points to as the kind of outsider art environment he envisions for what will be “my legacy project.”
Yet, de Christopher is no outsider artist. Despite his formal training background in graphic design, he spent his sophomore year in Italy working beside artisans. Later, inspired by nearby stonework at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan, he interrupted architectural studies at Columbia University to work there and then to carve gargoyles for the Jewish Museum of New York.
He moved to Franklin County 25 years ago after staying with some stone yard workers in Heath, and was offered — for free — the mostly Indiana limestone if he’d pay shipping charges to the Ashfield quarry, where he says he was working. The stone arrived with him after several moves, in 2001, to Turners Falls from Shutesbury.
After taking the pile with him along with each move, de Christopher says, “Finally, I thought, this is ridiculous. I can’t just keep shlepping this everywhere.”
Yet the piles have moved three times since, finally ending up on de Christopher’s Second Street studio lot. “Hopefully, I’m done moving it.”
During an I-Park Foundation residency in Connecticut last September, de Christopher took stock of the 200 to 300 stones remaining in his inventory, now totaling an estimated 60,000 pounds or so. For each piece of stone, he created a cardboard representation — to scale — of the Cathedral Project, so he could better imagine what he had to work with.
“I was playing with my blocks, just trying to organize, and make compositions that seemed appropriate,” says de Christopher. He was also inspired there to carve “Anatoly,” a Stalinesque worker in bib overalls, during his off time and bring him back home to Turners Falls — a community whose working spirit first attracted him and inspired his Cathedral Project.
The sculptor also brought back a renewed sense that it was time to devote himself to the long-term project, which had morphed as it gestated in his mind over the years, and will likely include Anatoly.
“The project is pretty daunting,” he admits. “When the concept was ‘the cathedral project,’ it basically intimidated me too much. I didn’t know what else to call it, or how to conceive of it, so as a result, I couldn’t manifest it. I couldn’t bring it to be.”
The “huge step” for de Christopher is that he’s turned the tables. “My ‘money … work’ will be my down-time work, and this project is going to be my main focus. I expect to work when and if I need it, but day-to-day is going to be focused on this project.”
After decades of working on installations like “Angel of Industry” or “Fruits of Our Labors,” de Christopher says he better understands how he can make his final landscape-scale project a reality in his own yard — one element at a time. Like most of his carving, though, it unfolds organically, with each chip of stone fleshing out the ideas he often roughs out on napkins.
“I’m old enough now to know the time has come to give the world my final project … It’s just a question of how to make it happen, to force myself,” he says, adding, “I can’t imagine it’s going to be any faster than 10 years. I just hope I live that long.”
Just to make it clear that he’s healthy, though, he recently sculpted “Strongman,” which may also someday be part of “Will and Testament.”
In 2001, de Christopher described his cathedral project as a monumental site-specific project, as “an archetypal story of the human condition as it has manifest through time, in its own unique way, in the village of Turners Falls.”
At the time, he added, “You walk into some of these large mill buildings, especially the abandoned mills, and they’re just so huge. They just evoke a response in me.”
He describes “Will and Testament” as a narrative showcase, “basically speaking to, or speaking about, the human spirit and aspirations, and aspirations toward loftier goals, and how people’s lives do or don’t reflect or achieve that.”
Those “stories of daily life” — in de Christopher’s words — come across in many of his other works, including getting a haircut and other everyday Turners Falls goings-on captured in “Rock, Paper Scissors” … or his 2000 “Angel of Industry” public-art installation in Elmira, N.Y., depicting a complex of mills with a factory owner, a job-seeking newcomer, laborers and more.
“We love to say the phrase ‘etched in stone’ with an ironic wink, but to me it has a vital immediacy,” de Christopher explains. “I am a stone carver, and I tell stories in stone.”
“The cathedral project itself always manifested itself in this core of mill buildings, with … smokestacks and bell towers, and they would ring the bells to bring people to work.”
For de Christopher, whose “slow, stubborn work in stone is an act of discovery,” as “I chip away at it, dig and claw and grind away … to find out what’s lurking beneath the surface,” he admits it’s uncertain exactly what his “Will and Testament” will be, or “how it’s going to work” to leave it as a legacy … possibly with a tiny carved cathedral where there might even be a hidden space for the ashes of his remains.
“Partly, I’m hoping, in like 10 years, there will be enough there installed that it will become kind of a landmark, and by some blessing, people will want it to be around.”
Another mentor de Christopher points to is Achilles Rizzoli, an architectural draftsman and “outsider artist” whose intricate, “populist-conceived sculptures” seem kindred spirits with the menagerie of collectibles in de Christopher’s own 2014 deCordova Museum installation, “Fruits of Our Labors.”
That homage to New England collectibles reflected “everything we’ve come across, all the places we’ve been, all the things we’ve done … our working lives and all the things we do and have left behind and have gone through, whether it’s chopping carrots for dinner or weighing things on a scale or being a factory worker.”
Looking back to Rizzoli’s work, to his own stone sculptures and ahead to his “Will and Testament,” de Christopher says, “I want to leave something behind like that — my view of the world, my statement.”
On the Web:
kck.st/2DA6oqq
www.timdechristopher.com