Since 2019, artist and academic Clair Chinnery has been making regular pilgrimages to the Isle of Portland to carve stone, working with the support of Hannah Sofaer and Paul Crabtree at the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust. For Chinnery, these trips are more than residencies; they are a return to an artistic moment she once sidestepped.

Back in 1990, as a 19-year-old first-year Fine Art undergraduate on a university field trip, she stood on Portland and refused to pick up a chisel, choosing instead to make assemblages from found materials at Church Ope Cove. Nearly three decades later, she returned to “make up for the lost carving opportunity”, and in doing so has developed a sculptural practice rooted in place, material and reflection. The fruits of this labour come in the form of beautiful, curved forms that she places under the title Conversations in Stone.

Working directly at the source of the stone has become central to how her forms emerge. Rather than imposing a fixed design, Chinnery allows the experience of carving Portland stone in situ to shape the outcome. She frames her approach as auto-ethnographic, using her own encounters with the island, its landscape and its industry as a lens through which to determine form.

Repeated visits to Portland have deepened her relationship with the material. Over time she has become fluent with traditional carving tools and processes, while also absorbing the wider context of the island: its quarrying heritage, fragile ecology and contemporary role in global mineral extraction. That layered understanding feeds directly into her making, giving the sculptures a quiet conceptual weight that goes beyond surface form.

These pieces are a reminder of how deeply material, place and process can intertwine – carved at the quarry face, informed by geology and industry, and shaped by a long-deferred artistic impulse.