Equally rich, though less studied, attitudes towards the land and techniques of stone masonry exist around the world. The Inca practiced the most advanced stone shaping and joinery techniques yet known. The artist Cesar Paternosto has suggested that the Inca used concepts from their advanced fibre technologies as a model for their landscape architecture and stone masonry. The Inca, who used twisted cord and knots in their Quipu notation system, the closest analogue to our writing, may well have expressed the interweaving of culture and nature in the stone masterworks they built. Their system of sacred organisational lines, called ceques , combined genealogy with religion and literally tied culture to the land. The Inca tended and cared for the huaca , or sacred places, along those lines. I think that this sense of weaving and fusion provided the impetus for the exquisite stone joinery of Inca walls, where the tightness of the seams between stones is legendary. In Art of the Andes , Rebecca Stone-Miller writes, ‘The Inca felt a special interchangeability with stones, believing them to be alive and able to transform into people and vice versa’. From a Western perspective, power may well have been expressed by the degree that culture and nature could be bound together. The implications of this fusion to our modern relations with nature are profound and stand in stark contrast to our primal conception of power expressed by the separation of culture from nature. Instead of amassing power by holding the forces of nature at bay as a king of Mycenae or early Rome might, the Inca ruler shaped mountains in an organic aesthetic and stone by stone, became a force of nature in his own right.
As a mason I join stone. As a landscape architect I use my skills to help join people to the land. My projects are small, but well-worked stone consistently leads people into nature. My goal is, bit by bit, to build better modern stonework that inspires others to recall that in spite of all we have done to separate ourselves from it, we are the land. v
Paternosto, Cesar. The Stone and the Thread: Andean roots of abstract art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Stone-Miller, Rebecca. Art of the Andes from Chavin to Inca . London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.
47
On Site review 23
Small Things
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator