china granite project.

The name Granite comes from the Latin word granum, meaning grain, and is an igneous rock formed of highly compacted crystalline grains created during the solidification of magma. Granite can vary in colour from whites, pinks, blues and greens through to dense black depending upon localised geochemistry and mineralogy. From just one quarry in Pai Fang Village I collected boulders of both emerald green and jet-black granite with which to produce my China Granite Project.

I worked in close collaboration with a small stone yard called An Li Stone in Chengnanzhuang, Hebei Province, 350km southwest of Beijing. I don’t speak a word of Mandarin and the stone-yard workers not a word of English, but with the help of the young nephew of Ling Hejun, the owner of An Li Stone, who could speak a tiny bit of English (and the dictionary on his mobile phone), plenty of sign-language and sketches directly on the surface of each boulder, we were able to successfully realise a collection of furniture pieces in Chinese granite. These include a concave-cut boulder chair in Chinese green granite using the natural radius of the diamond blade, three straight-cut boulder chairs in both Chinese green granite and black granite, a natural split quarter table, a twin boulder table and a selection of boulder stools and tables. Each granite boulder was selected for it’s natural characteristics as generated through millions of years of geothermal activity and revealed during the quarrying process, and only the minimum amount of cutting was performed on each boulder to achieve the desired appearance and function. Each cut surface was then polished using graded diamond pads and water.

max lamb.