Bio
Self-taught sculptor, stone mason and tour guide, Keith Trexler has been enhancing Stonehaven – his home / sculpture park at an abandoned granite quarry in Milford, NH – with eclectic art since 2010. After volunteering at Andres Institute of Art as a board member and watching remarkable sculptors at work during symposiums, Keith was inspired to start carving the discarded granite blocks lying about his backyard. His work is primitive, often modeled on ancient cultures, paleontology, nature, petroglyphs, and neolithic carvings, evoking a time when stone idols had power to spark imagination and wonder.
Statement
Living at Stonehaven - site of an abandoned historic quarry in southern New Hampshire - I am surrounded by chunks of granite wrestled from solid bedrock that were discarded as worthless a hundred years ago. After lying undisturbed under leaf-litter for a century, these blocks, splinters and shards are dug up and refashioned into primitive sculptures to reclaim the lost labor of those venerable stone cutters from the late 1880s to 1930s.
Sometimes I have an idea I want to execute, then search for a suitable stone, often tunneling into extensive grout piles until I find what I'm looking for. Other times, I stumble across a stone that speaks to me and helps reveal what's inside. I usually keep part of the stone's surface untouched, allowing its patina of age to remind me of its origin as the detritus of a century-old quarry operation and the often-frustrating work its stone cutters endured as over 85% of the stone they quarried was tossed aside in heaps of rubble.
