Nicholas Benson working on a full PGP personal unlocking key.
For twenty-five years I have designed and carved inscriptions in stone for notable civic memorials, private institutions and personal monuments throughout the United States. I have made hundreds of carefully hand drawn and hand cared gravestones, dedicatory tablets and building facade inscriptions. I am the third generation of my family to carry on our business and the ninth generation of carvers to continue it on the site where it was founded.
Our business has been producing work in the vein of classical inscriptions for over three hundred years. I have maintained a set of standards in craft, design and tradition that has persevered through trends of mechanization and modernization to remain very nearly unchanged since the business was founded in 1705. In fact, our work is remarkably similar to inscription carved thousands of years ago. We are an odd business in this day and age of digitization, computer driven production and mass marketing.
I received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 that allowed me to explore a new thread of artistically expressive and intellectual work that I have long hoped to develop. This work began as a study in classical stone carving methods influenced by contemporary, urban calligraphic forms. My method in both lettering and carving is influenced by the ancient tradition I have learned and practiced for decades. Within the parameters of this tradition I have, like all of the carvers who preceded me, developed a personal, stylistic vocabulary that inevitably informs these new explorations. One of the driving forces of this experiment is the conflict between, and confluence of, my accumulated skill and the freedom of the unbridled hand.
Beyond these matters of process, I am interested in the scientific, mathematic and informational languages of the digital age, and the tremendous amount of knowledge that is broadening our understanding of the universe. My current work is inspired by the unfathomable quantity of the digital information now globally disseminated on a daily basis. Of the many languages used in the digital realm, the vast majority of us do not understand any of them. On the whole, inscriptions in stone have traditionally recorded the praise and memory of Gods, men and events, or the simple identification of geographic locations and structures. These new inscriptions are in contrast to preconceptions of what is deemed worth of perpetuity. The text is not primarily literal but symbolic and representative of human progress and the greater questions that arise in light of it.
Is science becoming the new religion? If so, I am seeking a means of expression the age-old desire to indelibly record and reflect upon the progress of mankind.
