Rock, paper, scissors

Morrisville sculptor Thea Alvin rolls out new project

For years, motorists have pulled up alongside the looping, three-arch helix sculpture on Thea Alvin’s front lawn in Morristown.

Some snap a photo. Many get out of their cars to walk around the sculpture and try to figure out how it was built. A few daring admirers have pulled out a rock or two to take home as souvenirs, at times jeopardizing its stability.

“So many people stop here and they don’t know it’s OK to visit,” Alvin said. “It’s been a sculpture park space for years. I thought that if I had a gallery people would feel more comfortable.”

Alvin has come up with a way to let visitors know they are welcome while offering other artists an opportunity to showcase their artwork. This weekend, she’ll hold an opening reception for the Rock, Paper, Scissors Gallery.

Located in an 1810 barn that sits next to her antique farmhouse on Route 100, the gallery’s opening show, “Progress in Works,” will include sculptures, photography and pottery.

Several of Alvin’s tenants at the farmhouse are artists, including her daughter, Robyn, a photographer.

“I want people who live here to have a place where they can show their work,” Alvin said.

Last Friday the space was still an unfinished mix of hand-hewn beams, barn board walls and sloping floorboards.

“It’s old and funky,” Alvin said, surveying the work that lay ahead of the gallery opening. “Maybe I’ll suspend a sculpture from the rafters.”

The gallery will share a wall with the working side of the barn, which holds feather-footed chickens and angora goats.

The gallery and sculpture park will be open weekends from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and tours can be requested via email, thea@myearthwork.com.

Rock star

Alvin built her first stone arch more than a decade ago and owns a stonemason business, My Earthwork. She’s been commissioned to create stonework designs — from patios to walls and free-form sculptures to a full-size chapel — at private homes and public institutions.

During the past few summers, she’s spent time in southern Italy working with a group of volunteers to restore ancient stone homes that have fallen into ruin.

Last year, her work received worldwide acclaim when profiles about her appeared in the New York Times and in O Magazine.

Since then, demand for her services as both a stonemason and landscape designer have kept her calendar full.

She’s completed a 164-foot-long, 12-foot-high stone wall and arch at Duke University, and has been commissioned to create a sculpture in the gardens at St. Michael’s College and one at Kinstone Academy of Applied Permaculture in Minnesota.

There’s a waiting list to take the classes she teaches at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield.

And, this fall, she’ll set out to do commissions on a Greek island, and in Mexico and Australia.

Art everywhere

Art fills every nook on Alvin’s two-acre property. In addition to the popular looping arches on the lawn, there’s a new stone wall and gothic arch she created earlier this month with five apprentices.

Based on a Morse code dash-dot design, it was constructed with 30 tons of schist and other Vermont stone from quarries in Jeffersonville and Eden.

A stone-circle arch, known as a moon gate or window, sits in back of the property guarding an apple orchard. Old bicycles dangle from a butternut tree, serving as free-form sculptures.

A greenhouse and an outbuilding have been transformed into a carving studio. That’s where you’ll often find Alvin’s boyfriend, Michael Clookey, a sculptor who often assists with her stonemasonry commissions.

Alvin has also taken up carving, designing pieces out of clay and then using the clay forms as models for works made out of alabaster, marble and soapstone. Most feature human heads or forms.

“With all of my sculpture, I’m catching an expression,” Alvin said. “They are meant to capture real-life feelings of people.”

Mother Nature serves as artist-in-residence in other areas of the property.

Three greenhouses are filled with a bounty that feeds Alvin and her housemates for most of the year. There are also 50 blueberry plants, four beehives and rows of sea buckthorn, a medicinal plant that grows into a 12-foot hedge.

There’s a vineyard where vines form a lush green canopy, under which Alvin places a dining table in the summer months. A stone outdoor oven allows Alvin to serve alfresco pizza made from produce harvested from the garden.

This spring, she planted a hops garden with the hope of brewing her own beer.

An art colony

Alvin envisions her homestead becoming an art colony, with the gallery serving as a place where artists-in-residence can display and sell their work without paying expensive commissions.

“We’re trying to cultivate art here,” Alvin said. “It’s a place where people can live for less money with less privacy and share chores and meals.”

Alvin, who grew up on a commune, has long opened her home to friends in need of a place to stay. She believes in sharing what she has, whether the bounty from her garden, the eggs from her chickens, or an informal lesson on how to build a stone wall.

The art colony will be an extension of her philosophy.

“Several families can come together to share art and eat and grow and learn together,” Alvin said.

Rock, Paper, Scissors Gallery opening reception

“Progress in Works”

Friday, May 23, 6-8 p.m.

Route 100 south, Morrisville; look for the looping, three-arch stone sculpture and My Earthwork sign

Open Studio Weekend tours Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

Visits welcome by appointment; email thea@myearthwork.com or robynalvin@gmail.com.

See video of Thea in action here.