“Carving stone or wood is the gradual removal of material to allow the shape contained in the block to appear,” writes sculptor Lorrie Goulet in a new thick catalogue, The Sculptures of Lorrie Goulet. [2] The compilation covers sixty-six years of the artist’s output that has focused almost exclusively on the female form in stone (green serpentine, grey alabaster, pink granite, white Carrara marble, black Tennessee marble, granite, limestone) and wood (cedar, ebony, mahogany, olive, oak, walnut). Born in 1925, only five years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment that granted women the right to vote, Goulet, who expressed an early interest in stone carving, was told by her mother and friends, Girls don’t carve. The admonition did not stop her but did permeate the larger context of her training and professional life. “The potency of my work,” she says, “came from a climate not conducive to my success.”
The book also contains Goulet’s five meditations on sculpture, including this excerpt from “The Song of Sculpture.”
Lost ancient sculptures
In broken temples found
A residue of old glories
Of what man has done
Or wished to do
It is a song
Rising from the ruins
Echoed in the crumbling temples
That man and time
Each vandal in his own way
Has made