When the Dust Settles

Screenprints on newsprint, paper hats, 2025

7’6” h x 6’ w

When the Dust Settles considers the lineage of stone-carving labor over the years with an installation of paper hats made from screenprinted newsheets as part of Fracture Point at The Granite Museum in Barre, Vermont. These prints, which also form the backdrop for the hats, draw text from publications associated with Barre’s granite industry, including granite-related magazines from the 1940s and 50s, and a book on the region’s geology dating back to the 1920s, more than a decade after Barre’s first quarries opened. Stone carvers wore these paper hats, a design with roots stretching as far back as early Industrialized Europe, as they labored in the dusty confines of old stone carving factories. In this work, the hats, like the laborers over time, almost disappear into the progression of news and world narratives, their names and faces fading into the background. Though many may have been subsumed by the vagaries of time, forgotten by all but friends and family, their stone handiworks survive the centuries, reminders of the laborers of long ago.