When Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias in 1817, he was captivated by the news of a massive fragment of a statue of Ramesses II arriving at the British Museum. The poem he produced is perhaps the most famous meditation on the transience of power, yet for those who work with stone, the most compelling figure…
In the world of high-level stone carving, a piece is never truly finished until it meets the light it was designed for. A long-standing client of mine originally commissioned a pair of classical urns for a property in Bahrain. Several years after the completion of that commission, I was approached to move those same carvings…