Gowanus artist Steve Pauley’s work is rock solid! Pauley previously worked 11 years in the funerary arts as a tombstone engraver, creating more than 6,000 tombstones in West Virginia, Baltimore, and Brooklyn—including memorials at Greenwood Cemetery.
Today, Pauley creates magnificent sculptural works using sandblasting, engraving, or a hammer and chisel to carve intricate patterns and textures onto imposing slabs of stone. He traces graffiti—usually layer upon layer of multiple tags and spray painted graphics—that he finds around his neighborhood and sandblasts his tracings onto stone. He then uses the carved stone as a plate to create even more pieces. Using the textures he’s engraved onto a rock’s surface, he creates handmade paper, rubbings and prints. A selection of his multi-layered works including stone carvings, sculpture, and paper will be on view in Pulp and Pebble, a solo exhibit at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse.
"I’ve always been fascinated with stone," Pauley recalls. "When I was a kid, my parents bought me a rock tumbler that would polish the stones I collected from creek beds and fields. I used to look for colorful pebbles, fossils and arrowheads in the farms around my home. There is something magical about them to me. They can’t be carbon dated, so there is no way to know how old they are. You could be holding something millions of years old in your hands."
Born in North Carolina, Pauley's family moved to West Virginia when he was 12. Known for his artistic abilities in school, he was recruited after graduation by the monument shop near his home to make tombstones. "I worked my way through college making stones for the people in my community including the VFW, police and firefighters' memorials," he says. Pauley studied painting at WV State College and Marshall University before earning his MFA in mixed media sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.
Accessing the tools needed to sandblast his formidable stone works is not easy, so Pauley has to devise ingenious alternatives to create his art. He uses his carved stone pieces for "stone reflection photography," a photographic process that uses the reflective qualities and textures of engraved stone as negatives to produce black and white photograms. Pauley has built a camera obscura in his studio to process images from reflections cast from his embellished stone pieces. The homemade device can produce prints as large as 42 x 70 inches!
Whatever medium Pauley chooses, his artwork is a study in contradictions—delicate and hard, light and dark, ephemeral and enduring—that examines the fleeting nature of life and what we leave behind. "This body of work is like a snapshot of my neighborhood," Pauley says. "I make stones that are about life and living in a city full of energy. When people see my art, I want them to feel that same energy and know that the marks they make mean something to others." See more of Pauley's work at stevepauleystudio.com.
Pulp and Pebble
Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse
165 2nd Street, Brooklyn, NY
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 2, 6pm-8pm
On view Saturdays & Sundays in April, 1pm-5pm
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