Saturday 20 March 2010

Mastercrafts stone carving courses and apprenticeships

For folk who enjoyed the mastercrafts stone episode last night and would  like to find out more or perhaps book or short course to try carving themselves we have put a little bit of information together.

First Andy Oldfield the mentor of the program and runs a variety of taster courses, here are his contact details  and a typical taster workshop. or weekend workshop.

Probably the best resource in the country for anyone wanting to learn more about stone is the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire. They run carving courses as well as dry stone walling and having lots of interesting displays. 

Sam Fridlington runs courses in Lincolnshire, 19 years experience as a stonemason including working on Lincoln Cathedral.

The building crafts have received much more support and recognition than the smaller domestic traditional crafts or industrial town based crafts that made all the objects of our daily lives. A lack of skilled stonemasons and other building skills was identified as a problem in the 2000 HLF report "Sustaining our living heritage" and this led to the setting up of the heritage training bursary schemes, which have received so far over £10m from HLF and helped train many hundreds of apprentices in traditional building skills. Construction Skills have also been very supportive and National Heritage Training Group have one great work.

1 comment:

  1. As I knew Stone Carving course facilitates the students with various options. Student will explore and practice different approaches to working, carving and composing with marble and granite. Daily discussions and artist presentations dealing with the abstract in sculpture and its relationship to the environment will be the focus of this workshop. The idea or concept shapes the stone and the environment by means of the technical effort, which can best facilitate the making of a sculpture.

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