Sidney Bolam was working as a part-time portrait artist and illustrator when she realized she no longer connected with those mediums.
After having children, Bolam searched for a medium that she could work with around kids — paints were too messy. For a while, she dabbled in making toys, but that didn’t satisfy the itch either.
“I was feeling really lost and empty as an artist,” she says.
Then, she began working with James Connor, a Brown County artist who introduced her to limestone carving. Something clicked.
“I loved every minute,” she said. “I liked it more than I ever did with painting.”
Thus began Bolam’s love affair with limestone.
Bolam is a limestone carver from Brown County with her own studio, Bohemian Hobbit Studio. Her small, nature-inspired pieces are making limestone carving accessible to Indiana limestone enthusiasts.
“I’ve always been kind of fascinated with limestone,” Bolam said. “Even if you leave it alone, it sculpts itself — all those different layers of destruction and creation.”
She feels limestone all around her, she said — the bed of southern Indiana limestone underneath her feet, the limestone carvings by local artisans that can be found on the streets of Bloomington and the limestone that built far-away cities like Chicago and New York. Bolam thinks of the ancient connection too, like the limestone in the pyramids and classical Greek buildings.
“Everywhere there is limestone, people carve it,” she said. “But Indiana limestone is special.”
Bolam starts transforming a piece of limestone by sketching with pencil or chalk and then creates a rough outline with a Dremel, a handheld rotary tool. Using a pneumatic chisel, she removes any unwanted materials, working in a relief method. Finally, she uses the Dremel tool again to give the piece further detail.
Unlike many limestone carvers, Bolam works on a small scale. Many of her pieces can be held in two hands. Working on this scale has allowed her to fill an untapped niche, she said.
The small size of her work has also allowed many people to be able to own their own piece of local limestone culture, Dave Colman said.
Colman is the co-owner of The Venue, where Bolam’s art will be on display all June. Colman extended the length of Bolam’s exhibit after visitors responded positively with sales and feedback. Customers resonate with the local nature of Bolam’s work, Colman said, but also with the “touch of infinity about them.”
“There’s a sense of immortality in these carved stones,” he said. “If you buy one of these pieces, you know it’s going to stick around.”
Such is the duality of limestone, Bolam said.
“It’s soft enough to carve, but it will last forever,” she said.
Her carvings are labors of love. Kept outside by the messy nature of stone carving, Bolam bundles up in the winter — she swears by the woolen Norwegian long underwear she received as a gift — and lathers up with sunscreen in the summer to keep at her craft.
If she didn’t cover her hair to protect it from the dust, she said, it would turn to cement.
She describes the process as physically exhausting, working at it for a couple days before taking a few days off.
“You have major jelly arms when you’re done,” she said.
But she and many other stonecarvers work through the intense conditions. Southern Indiana is home to a vibrant limestone carving scene. In June, the Indiana Limestone Symposium sets up in Ellettsville.
Limestone carvers of all experience levels have congregated at the Bybee Stone Company since 1996 to collaborate and explore the art of limestone carving. The next session will run June 18 to 24.
Bolam hopes to attend the symposium next year and expose herself to the knowledge and experience of other limestone carvers.
In the meantime, she continues to draw inspiration from the art and nature all around her. It’s hard not to be inspired, she said, by the “shock and awe” of Indiana nature, like the snapping turtles, cicadas and mummified birds that she stumbles across at her home in Brown County.
“Living in Indiana shaped who I am,” she said. “There’s just something about the humble beauty of Indiana.”
