Denying Gravity: Woods Davy and the Assembly of Stones

Woods Davy’s sculptures play against expectation and gravitational force as we know it. With stones (and sometimes coral) seeming to effortlessly float like clouds, the sculptures rise heavenward, the assemblies evoking a sense of serenity and eternity despite their precarious balance. Art critic Holly Meyers of the Los Angeles Times writes of Davy’s art, “There is something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties” and yet, at the same time, is able to communicate a sense of “meditative reverence.”

Davy chooses his stones carefully, searching the shoreline for those that have been rounded and smoothed by the tumbling effects of the sea. He aims to find perfect sizes and shapes that can take their place among the others and become integral to the whole. The stones unfurl like the waves that shaped them, the results unfolding in a narrative that is at once natural and handwrought, ancient and new.