{"id":57980,"date":"2021-04-16T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2021-04-16T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=57980"},"modified":"2021-05-14T08:08:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T14:08:34","slug":"jonna-ramey-finds-a-sense-of-place-in-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jonna-ramey-finds-a-sense-of-place-in-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonna Ramey Finds a Sense of Place in Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It seems a small studio for a stone sculptor \u2014 just 85 square feet, Jonna Ramey says \u2014 tucked at the back of the family garage, but it\u2019s brightly lit, even on this dreary Sunday, with a wall of cheery windows and decent overheads. The space is OCD tidy: the business of \u201ca place for everything and everything in its place\u201d has proven an exacting but satisfying exercise for this artist.<\/h4>\n

More on the studio later.<\/h4>\n

What\u2019s important to know upfront is that in 2018 Ramey, a California transplant, committed to carve a body of work exclusively from honeycomb calcite (recently declared Utah\u2019s state stone \u2014 like the seagull is the state bird) that\u2019s mined in Hanna, in western Duchesne County, on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation.<\/h4>\n

\u201cAs a stone sculptor,\u201d Ramey tells us, \u201cI recognize that stone is place. Honeycomb calcite is a uniquely Utah stone. I love the challenge of working it here where I live. Working a local stone can be a way of getting to know where you live, a means to come to terms with place.\u201d<\/h4>\n

It took her three years to finalize her 2018 promise and now 13 pieces from that period can be seen in a solo exhibition,\u00a0\u00a0Beyond Beauty: A Conversation in Stone<\/em>, at the George S. and Dolores Dor\u00e9 Eccles Gallery, Salt Lake Community College, through May 21.<\/h4>\n

\u201cIn its natural state, honeycomb calcite is so beautiful that it\u2019s challenging to create sculpture that allows the viewer to see beyond the stone itself,\u201d writes Ramey in an artist statement. \u201cI work to get past this distraction and explore ideas that compel me.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Oquirrh Moonrise \u2013 Ghost Owl,”\u00a02020, honeycomb calcite, 7″H x 16\u201dW x 5\u201dD.<\/p><\/div>\n

Her sculptures seem to arise from a primeval world: an eerie moonrise over the Oquirrhs on one side of a work manifests as a feathered owl on the reverse as the stone shifts color and mood from ghostly white to a soft apricot;\u00a0<\/strong>two notably voluptuous nudes, strong as Valkyries, emerge from their individual rocks in icy opaque shades of marmalade;\u00a0<\/strong>Ramey\u2019s “Leaf on the Water” carries a flavor of fall and a clear sensation of floating downriver, while the moving, birdlike “Golden Protector”<\/em>\u00a0sits hovering over an orb it shields seemingly lovingly in its arms. 2020. Honeycomb calcite on purpleheart. 14\u201dH x 8\u201dW x 7.25\u201dD.<\/h4>\n
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“Oquirrh Moonrise \u2013 Ghost Owl,”\u00a02020, honeycomb calcite, 7″H x 16\u201dW x 5\u201dD.<\/p><\/div>\n

Born in Lafayette, Ind., 70 years ago, Ramey \u201clived there long enough to have one tooth,\u201d\u00a0 she quips, before spending most of the rest of her life in California. Her father, whose desk sign sits prominently on a counter, was an earth scientist who ended his career as a professor of petroleum engineering at Stanford. \u201cMe, I carve stone. He would have loved that,\u201d she says with a smile. She attended Stanford, herself, after being a high school kid in Northern California in 1966 during the Summer of Love \u2013 \u201cso how could you not be a crazy hippie?\u201d she asks rhetorically. She came to Utah first in 2002 with her wife, Morgan Ray, a poet, then moved back to Sonoma in 2007 or 2008; the couple moved to Salt Lake City permanently in 2014.<\/h4>\n

Ramey did media for the Migrant Student Record Transfer System in Sacramento, where records of the children of migrant workers could follow them from school to school thanks to a computer housed in Tennessee; she did photography, too, and freelanced in the film business. \u201cI painted Christmas greetings on store windows \u2014 my best was a group of witches in a circle on a window of a porn theater. I had a lot of weird-ass jobs but mostly I made my living as a film writer and director. Most of my clients were corporate and most of my training was in educational filmmaking. Periodically, we could afford to make films about artists. Art\u2019s been in my heart forever. That was another life,\u201d Ramey muses. \u201cBut all my life experiences formed my life as a sculptor.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Soaring Without Wings (Serena),” 2020, honeycomb calcite, wood, 15\u201dH x 8.75\u201dW x 8\u201dD, was inspired by the strength, resiliency and power of athlete Serena Williams.<\/p><\/div>\n

That she came to that at all was a fluke. That she even came to Utah was because Ray\u2019s mother lived here, was ill and in need of constant care. \u201cSo, we came out here to take care of her. We happened to see on the side of a bus about the Zimbabwean sculpture at Red Butte Garden \u2014 we didn\u2019t even know what that was<\/em>. We had never heard of Red Butte Garden. It was total happenstance. We needed a break. And those sculptures were screaming, ‘Look at me.’ The Zimbabweans were only here because the Chihuly glass show was so popular that it was extended at the Horticultural Garden in Chicago and they got bumped. And to see someone [carving stone] and to find out you could learn how to do it from them. I come from a history of being a filmmaker and it\u2019s all about storytelling. I learned a sense of texture from the Zimbabweans, too. Storytelling and texture. I wanted to tell these stories in stone. And I\u2019ve been doing it ever since,\u201d she says.<\/h4>\n

\u201cTo use sculpture as a voice as an older woman; and to make art speak to contemporary issues, a type of art that is slow in its nature \u2014 for me it is an ideal form. It forces me to distill ideas down to an image or a set of images that are compelling in and of themselves and hopefully says something to somebody else.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Ramey\u2019s reputation, though not in the field of sculpture, pre-dates our interview. The New York Times ran a piece about the poetry wall Ramey and her wife put up in front of their Salt Lake City home to cheer neighbors during the Pandemic \u2013 a new verse posted twice a week by a known or unknown scribe. It first appeared in the Times\u2019 \u201cAt Home\u201d newsletter in February and was republished on page 3 of the Sunday print edition in late March with a photo of a poem hanging on a repurposed election sign in the front yard along with an edited version of Ramey\u2019s original letter to the newspaper about her project. In it she explains:<\/h4>\n

Because he died this week, I went looking on the internet for a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem I had not yet shown. Since the pandemic began, I post poems in my front yard twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. I photograph them and digitally display them throughout Salt Lake neighborhoods via Nextdoor and wider via Instagram and Facebook. Poet laureates of towns, states, and nations, poets long dead, very young poets, poets of every color and identity, poets, poets, poets. People walk by, stop, and read. My wife saw a mom have her son read a poem aloud to her. We watched a woman read \u201cThe Everlasting Self\u201d by Tracy K. Smith to her dog. Three boys on bikes came by and read a poem together. A handful of kids hooted over \u201cSnowball\u201d by Shel Silverstein. Someone thanked us with a note scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk. Before lockdown, a local church group held a Sunday school session about one of the poems. Masked folks have hollered their thanks from 20 feet away or shoved cards through our mail slot. We\u2019re now known as the Poetry Ladies in our Wasatch Hollow neighborhood.<\/h4>\n
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“Golden Protector, 2020, honeycomb calcite on purpleheart wood, 14\u201dH x 8\u201dW x 7.25\u201dD, was inspired by emperor penguins protecting their eggs.<\/p><\/div>\n

As mentioned above, in the studio there is a precise place for everything. The work counters display a marvelous mascot figure from Zimbabwe and the desk sign that was her father\u2019s \u2013 everything else is purely business. Ramey has installed shelving beneath the work counters with cleverly made bins and covers to protect the contents from the rock dust that inevitably fills the air, despite large filter machines. Off to the right, a curtain separates a section of the studio set up for sculpting larger rock.<\/h4>\n

Ramey spends, on a short day, a couple of hours in the studio. On what she terms a \u201cgood\u201d day, \u201cI get lost out here, until Morgan bangs on the door and says it\u2019s dinnertime.\u201d But she always puts in daily studio time. If she has a large piece to work on, she lets her subconscious do the initial foray and sometimes starts with a smaller stone before she approaches the large one. Ramey says she occasionally might have a detail from a previous work that she wishes to emulate in new stone.<\/h4>\n

When she is working, Ramey sometimes needs to stop and find a base before she can go further with a piece. \u201cI have to find out how this is going to stand,\u201d she says. She thinks about its weight, how it might balance, how the light will come through the work \u2013 there are many considerations. \u201cI collect different things to use for bases \u2013 this still has the bark on it . . . and here is this beautiful piece of sandstone which just knocked me out. Whatever sculpture I put on it has to stand up to this amazing base. This is a hardwood from Guiana called purpleheart. And I use a lot of pieces of granite. I have all these pieces that I have machinists cut down. So, I love to find stuff, mixing up found objects.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Leaf on the Water,” 2020, honeycomb calcite on limestone, 12\u201dH x 9\u201dW x 6.5\u201dD<\/p><\/div>\n

Ramey hauls out serpentines from Zimbabwe from a bin beneath a counter, then, \u201cAren\u2019t these beautiful? I have a friend in California who let me buy a bunch of the smaller colors and I use these as bases for the little sculptures \u2013 these are so full of little fractures and seams that you have to drill carefully …\u201d<\/h4>\n

She might use power tools but says, \u201cIt carves so fast you have to be really careful because you can make a mistake before you even realize it. The challenge with me with power tools is that when the stone is soft, you can dig in and through well before you know it. Some of the harder stone, like the serpentines, pushes back more than, say, an alabaster will. Alabaster is almost too soft for me. I like something that pushes back. Or some of the softer marbles \u2014 I don\u2019t really work marble. I just haven\u2019t had much exposure to it and, at this stage of my life, I really<\/em>\u00a0like some of these other stones so I\u2019ll just keep working with them. There\u2019s a lot of stone in the world,\u201d she says firmly.<\/h4>\n
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A “masked-up” Raney inside her studio<\/p><\/div>\n

Ramey turns to her enormous collection of hand tools \u2014 \u201cI feel like somebody\u2019s dad with a garage full of tools, but I know every little thing and what I can do with it. I sand a lot and I have an accordion file of sandpapers,\u201d she says, holding it up. \u201cThis is my bag of little files and finishing tools.\u201d Only a very few tools are made for stone sculptors and she has had to create some for herself. \u201cTypically, the tools are made for something and somebody else and we cannibalize it,\u201d says Ramey. Since she and a group of friends started learning stone carving from the group of Zimbabwean teachers in a workshop setting, the portable tool bags were a necessity. Then, she proffers a tool in which she especially delights: It came from the late, well-known Utah artist Edie Roberson, who was known to dabble in a bit of everything.<\/h4>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have as many artist friends as I did in California,\u201d notes Ramey, \u201cbut there are a lot of good artists here and I am slowly getting to know them. I like the range of art here; I like the level in which a lot of people are working. I really respect so much of what\u2019s going on in the art scene; it\u2019s a good place to be creative and bounce off other creative vision.\u201d<\/h4>\n

This \u201caccidental\u201d stone sculptor adds: \u201cI\u2019m excited for people to see the show and I\u2019m looking forward to feedback about it. Of all the places I could have landed, I\u2019m glad it\u2019s this one.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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Beyond Beauty: A Conversation in Stone<\/em>, George S. and Dolores Dor\u00e9 Eccles Gallery, Salt Lake Community College, 1575 S. State St.,\u00a0 Apr. 15 – May 21. Covid restrictions mean there will not be an opening reception, but anyone interested in discussing the work can contact the artist at Jonna.ramey@att.net<\/a>\u00a0for an accompanied walkthrough during gallery hours, weekdays, 7 a.m. \u2013 10 p.m. The same hours apply for Gallery Stroll on Friday.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems a small studio for a stone sculptor \u2014 just 85 square feet, Jonna Ramey says \u2014 tucked at the back of the family garage, but it\u2019s brightly lit, even on this dreary Sunday, with a wall of cheery windows and decent overheads. The space is OCD […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":57994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[2880,3954],"class_list":["post-57980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts","tag-jonna-ramey","tag-morgan-ray"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/thumbnail-1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-17 21:22:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57980"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58002,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57980\/revisions\/58002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}