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Fred Whitman: Hand-Carved Stone Sculpture

Updated: May 7




Looking into a block of stone can be confounding. What's in there? The stone usually needs to tell me. I'm just here to remove the rock that's covering the inhabitant within.


Kansas Fenceposts are unique in that each one has it's own shape and features. Sure, they're all tall and narrow, but each one dances differently.

The way I see it, each one of these posts already has two stories being told that I don't want to interupt.


This 9" thick layer of Limestone was laid down on a shallow ocean floor that occupied the center of North America 75 million years ago. Each post has a collection of clam shells, oysters, and the occaisonal amenite decorating the surface. Inside the post there are different layers of color depiciting the iron in the sea life that made this bed of rock.

Then there's the story that the settlers of Kansas told120 years ago when they quaried these columns to be used as fenceposts. You'll find drill marks along the side where they broke the rock out of the ground. Then old square nails and grooves where the barbed wire rubbed for over 100 years.


I'm just adding another chapter.




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