CNC Sculptor: Jon Isherwood

   For Isherwood, based in Hudson, N.Y., the tool paths that most stone fabricators use to form ogees and bullnoses take entirely different routes, as shapes and swirls and a final figure that gives his sculpture a fresh look.
   It’s a collaboration that began only a few years ago, although Isherwood began working with stone in the early 1990s. Previous to that, he’d worked with concrete and steel; his work with stone first dealt with larger monolithic forms, aided with the use of diamond-wire saws to create the images.
   The opportunity to use an OMAG CNC machine at the former Johnson Atelier facility in New Jersey several years ago, however, changed his approach to stone. And, a machine designed to speed production of countertops began doing things that created a new style that’s won praise from the art community.
   Two years ago, as the Johnson Atelier moved to close its stone division, Isherwood joined other artists to create the Digital Stone Project in Mercerville, N.J. With a combination of donations and financing, the artists continue to operate the facility. Isherwood serves as a member of the board of directors, and also continues to work on – and expand his creativity with – the CNC.
  
   Q: How did you begin with CNC?
   A:  In terms of my own involvement – I was working with a facility in Pennsylvania where we were basically wire-sawing pieces, and they were very monolithic. Then, I discovered this technology (CNC) at the former Johnson Atelier
   I had been thinking about, in some way, replication, or multiples, or variations in terms of making work. In the art world, you can do a photograph, and it can be a multiple, or you can do a print, which can be a multiple; but sculptures in stone are always an original, to a degree.
   The CNC process allowed us some duplication once a file had been developed. That, to me, was very fascinating as far as the commercial aspect of promoting work and making work for sales. Also, that digital process allows for variation of scale and size, and then even some stretching and morphing and adjusting.
  
   And this was the first time you’d run across a CNC machine for stone?
   Yes, it was. I’d been through a variety of stone facilities in Barre, Vt., and out at Cold Spring in Minnesota, and other locations in Pennsylvania, but I hadn’t been introduced in that way. I knew about the processes because of CAD programs and design processes, and people like Frank Gehry have been using prototyping machines. But, the ability to carve stone through five axes was something I didn’t know was even possible.
   The premise of the Digital Stone Project is that we have these machines, and how could you adapt or advance your making process. The incredible potential to realize something, and use the varying files in different ways, really opens up an incredible breadth of approaches to stone that, in a traditional sense, one doesn’t recognize immediately.
   One sense of stone is that it’s a dimensional material. One thinks of it on a facade or relatively two-dimensional in terms of surface; or, in a more-traditional sense. as a memorial – a gray stone or a figurative rendition.
   Somehow stone is seen as the traditional material of the old masters, like Michelangelo or Donatello, and then people like Henry Moore and Isamu Naguchi through the early part of the 20th century. It’s really a modern material for sculptures and not something on anybody’s radar in terms of contemporary galleries and museums.
   The significant interest to me and a group of contemporary artists was the interactivity that can go on in the developmental stages of a work. One can work in a very soft material like clay, or even work within a program – a Rhinoceros® 3D modeling program – and develop forms that may not initially be conducive or even associated with stone. There’s a certain analysis, and you have to consider if a form could be cut or not, because of undercuts and thicknesses and so forth. But the ability – the way which certain files can invent new form for sculpture – is a very interesting aspect of this.
   Sculpture has either been thought about as a very organic form – an abstract organic form – coming from nature, although we often have a realistic form coming from a figure. The ability, as with the design world and the architectural world, to push and shape and develop form within a computer program is really inventing new shapes and a new language of shapes.
    Once you have done your renderings or made your scans from your clay model, or you’ve developed a three-dimensional image, the transferal back to stone strangely and magically brings it back into a very real sense of a form. It has a certain reality and density and weight that no other form can bring to sculpture, and that’s why a lot of artists are beginning to think about stone as a sculptural material through these processes. That sort of sensibility is making that wonderful combination of something that’s incredibly modern in terms of its developmental stage, but has a wonderful kind of traditional sensibility because of the material. There’s a kind of wonderful breadth there.
  
   There’s an importance of interrelation of spaces in your work. Is that something that CNC allows you to explore more than traditional methods?
   I think that it’s definitely allowed me to get an incredibly precise kind of surface. It’s not a generalized surface; it’s a surface and form that is absolutely exact to my initial intentions. So, in a way – and this is a terrible thing to say – it circumvents the traditional handcarver. It sort of gets you to the point, in duplication of the marble or the program, of virtually giving you specifically what you ask for – there’s no compromise or generalization.
   Obviously, that form has to be aesthetically pleasing and complete, but it gives you that wonderful exactness. One is able to really determine what one wants out of the material.
   There’s the potential for mistake in case the program goes wrong, but if everything runs well, you get exactly what you want. The incredible precision is what’s so exciting; it brings an incredible intensity to an image.
  
   The first time I saw your work, I instantly recognized the marks of CNC tooling on the stone. Is that kind of texturing something you intended with your designs, or did you discover it when you started working with a CNC?
   I discovered that because I was allowed, through the Digital Stone Project, to be present when we were cutting the stone with the piece on the mill. Originally I had made something that was fairly smooth; I had started in clay, and I had smoothed them, cast them in plaster, and worked with them in wet and dry down to the 600s.
   When those rough surfaces occurred from the milling head, it was an incredible discovery, because of the way that those lines have been generated … they follow the form exactly. As soon as I saw that, we started to have a dialogue about tool paths.
   This isn’t just about a tool path; it’s creating patterns. We started to work with certain software with the tooling, doing criss-cross and diagonals and spirals, and also used different tools at different speeds at different stages of the cutting, with the path leaving different type of mark. We then recognized that different stones behave differently in terms of the way the tool path would be left on them.
   It was like seeing what a pencil could do. You notice the tool path and then see there’s something interesting. I studied many years ago in textile design, and the sense of pattern and surface was so significant and important back then. Suddenly, the ability to put texture and pattern on the stone was just fascinating.
  
   Is there any particular type of stone you like to use in your work?
   What I look for is a stone that doesn’t have a lot of veining or a lot of color differentiation. My forms are more singular, and one’s looking for a stone that has more of a singular presence to it.
   I was using some Zimbabwean granite, and then we used some Fox Hills granite from Pennsylvania. These were very hard materials and very hard on the machines; it’s also incredibly time-consuming, because one’s being billed at an hourly rate for the CNC.
   The discovery of some travertine and then the Antique Verde marble, and recently the Champlain marbles and the Swanson marbles that are actually limestone, are really wonderful material to cut because they’re fine and have a rather singular color variation to them.
  
   How do you find your stone?
   I’ve taken trips to Vermont; I go around the stoneyards in Barre and have a look around to see what interests me. We just bought a container from Italy; I didn’t go, but a couple of guys went over and bought 40,000 lbs of dimensional block.
   Because sculptors aren’t buying in quantity – we’re not going to do a whole building or something – we’re finding that we go to distributors. I’ve also found stone when I look through magazines, or people will drop you a line on the Internet and tell you that they’ve just opened a new quarry. They’ll say that there’s a new vein coming out of some Georgia quarry, or out in the Midwest, and people will send you a sample.
   A lot of the marbles are kind of whitish, and my work isn’t conducive to that. It’s always a struggle to find something darker and denser. I’ve used some limestone out of Indiana.
   Also, I hate to say this, but artists are a bit of problem for industry – sometimes, when you say you only want a block of something, it’s not worth it for some quarries, and then the trucking is expensive.
   I’ve built up good relationship, like with the people out at Cold Spring where I get some larger boulders that I carve by hand and then cut CNC patters into them. They’re relationships that you slowly build up. The quarry guys at St. Cloud put stuff aside and then ask me to have a look at it;
  
   Did the use of the CNC also change your selection of stone?   
   I think it did. The one thing is that the quality of stone had to be much better, just because you don’t want to put a block on the mill that has any fractures or potential to break or fragment. I think also that because the way I used to work was more monolithic, and enhancing the found nature or the beauty of the found rock or the quarried piece of rock. In the instance of CNC, one doesn’t really select the block for its aesthetic shape; you select the block for the consistency in color and so forth.
  
   Has the use of the CNC put you on a track where you’ve changed the scale, and maybe made your work a little more personal?
   A little bit, yes, and this is something I’m trying to work through. There are certain restrictions on the mill; what I’m presently doing is think about how I can work larger, and maybe through programs that would allow me to segment the pieces and then construct on a larger scale – in a way, to mill sections. It’s restrictive, because CNC is more-expensive to run than working with a large block and a wire saw.
   I have a project I’m working on in England, which is one of the vessel-type forms being enlarged to about 12’ tall and 12’ wide. What we’ve going to have to do is to work on a program that will predetermine and design the construction details, mill in sections, and then piece the work together – almost like building it in blocks. It’s kind of exciting in developing programs and starting to address scale .
   Additionally, I’ve been shortlisted for projects in Texas and Grand Rapids, Mich., where I’m working to get the sculpture to be 14’ to 18’ tall using the milling process. Just trying to think through may mean doing it in a model stage, working in sections and then piecing together in milled sections.
   The technology allows you to reinvent approaches, and that’s the good thing.
  
   What about another new project using CNC?
   I was commissioned by the public arts project in Minnesota for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul; I was asked to make a series of sculptures to go around the new science building. The intriguing thing is that these are the laboratories where they do all the kind of CSI stuff – they solve the crimes and analyze all the evidence.
   Through a wonderful conversation with all the scientists, I realized very quickly that they have a lot of imagery to detect and solve these crimes: matching ballistics, blood sampling and these kinds of things. Additionally, that geographic area was one with incredible amounts of glacial activity; it’s a granite area too because of St. Cloud. Minn.
   My proposition was to bring 12 very large glacial boulders back into and through the property. I cut them in various places – in half and so forth – splitting them open, and then I put the evidence imagery inside those polished surfaces.
   I took imagery they gave me and I developed designs, and then we scanned those designs and developed tool paths that gave us certain depths of cut. We then scaled them to these cut boulders and milled them into the surfaces.
   We had a wonderful relationship with the architect, and we were able to put them into stairways and around the building and pathways; we split them and they became sort of either side of a pathway like an entrance. It was very exciting process, and the wonderful thing was the combination of the collaboration of the scientists, the quarrymen at Cold Spring and the Digital Stone Project and the public arts program. Those pieces were quite large – the biggest boulder was around 30.000 lbs., and in that instance the scale was quite considerable.
   The interesting thing that happened was the response from the scientists and their enjoyment of the work. They were able to walk out and recognize some of the imagery they use on a daily basis, but they were also able to think about it in a more-expressive and -creative way so it gave them pause for though. They said that often when they went back in the lab, they felt inspired and encouraged to think slightly differently about the clues they were trying to put together and it was sort of helpful and intersting to them. That moment when you can’t solve something and you’re trying to think about it, and then gaze at something and think about something in a different way is just quite marvelous. It was doubly inspiring.
  
   Did you ever feel that you’d be able to express that way when you first started looking at stone?
   The fascinating thing about stone is that it was an incredible challenge in that, when I first started to think about stone, it was incredibly heavy and impenetrable. Then one thinks about the history of stone, and the incredible craftsmanship that people have applied to stone carving, and the incredible sensibility that has come from human intervention with stone through cutting and carving, one is almost immediately floored by the human spirit imposed into that rock.
   This was the sort of wonder and awe with this material: What can it become? I think it was really about that. And it was the recognition that the CNC could accelerate me into a place where I would have that ability and control to put place to find form. The technology moves me to something quite new, and hopefully people will see it as a contribution to how people can think about stone and its expressive qualities
  
   Do you worry about being stereotyped the digital guy with stone? Are you worried the mechanics of this may overshadow what you’re really trying to do?
   It’s a great question. I’ve had quite a few national and international reviews; there are people who are very fearful of technology, and they propose that the artist really isn’t doing anything if it’s been made by a computer. That’s disturbing, because it negates the fact that there’s an incredible struggle, and it negates the fact that computers don’t think. Computers don’t have the ability to do anything unless humans instruct them, and the fear that a new tool is somehow removing the artist’s sensibility and the artist’s hands is worrisome for me.
   With any technical development or any sort of aesthetic development, there’s always sort of a lot of reservation and fear. Picasso developed and invented Cubism, and the art world rebelled against it as totally the wrong way; now it’s a cherished and praised movement.
   I think that there’s a transition period where somehow the artist being in his garret and being in his studio shivering and freezing with his hammer and chisel  is a romantic idea, and that’s the image they want. To think that we’re now involved in similar techniques and technologies that the rest of the world is involved sort of scares them a bit.
   It is worrisome, because people become very interested in the technology, and one worries whether they’re missing the beauty of the technology when they’re mainly concentrating on the process. It’s a fine line, and one hopes in the end that the objects carry through for themselves and they have beauty and presence, and that the technology is just in support of it
   I hope that in the end the work the layperson – the person that doesn’t know the technology –only thinks about the beauty of the object rather than the technologies.
   My balance is one I’ve been trying to get in that I have been using milling and carving in rougher boulders and granite, and trying to create a balance in how people perceive the work.
   If people perceive that you’re the guy doing a certain thing, it locks you in a little bit. But I feel that there’s a career in this anyway, so why wouldn’t you just embrace it?
  
   Are you looking at different ways of developing technology for more creativity?
   We’ve been working with processes that give the ability to take patterns and then wrap them onto forms. These are 3D programs that allow you to create a surface, and then wrap and morph it, almost like a ghost or a veil onto a form. I’m also working with a video artist on pieces that are time-based where we can freeze some of those images and work through processes and technologies to carve those forms into single blocks of material.
   The advancements I’m trying to make are not specifically with the machine, or in how we make this machine do something different. I think that one can only make a machine do something different if you propose different form or design. What comes then is how the machine behaves; I feel that my advancements can occur through the field of image-making and then bringing them to the machine to find solution through the processes.
   We’ve also been working with ScanTech in finding ways we can make the machines more efficient, cut in different patterns, different processes, cut through different axes and so forth. The machine is set up to perform in a certain way, with the most-economic and simplest method in an axis. In some cases, that isn’t the way one needs to create a certain sculpture, so we’re breaking down the tool-path windows to create different methods of cutting.
   We no longer have to look to the organic or look to the figurative; we can be much-more-inventive in how we capture an image. Because the digital process is all pixels and digits, you can walk around with your digital camera; if one can capture an image, one can give it depth and carve into it in relief. When you start to manipulate those images, you very soon start to create new forms and new shapes.
 –  Interviewed by Emerson Schwartzkopf

This article first appeared in the February 2006 print edition of Stone Business. © 2006 Western Business Media Inc.