Sculptural cob and earthen work — figures, reliefs, garden features, and site-specific installations built from clay, sand, and straw.
Cob is not just a building material — it is a sculptural medium. The same mix of clay, sand, and straw that builds walls and ovens can be shaped into figures, reliefs, carved surfaces, and free-standing sculptures. This is where the artist-builder tradition lives — in the carved faces on walls, the sculpted dragons over doorways, the relief panels worked into a garden fence. These pieces are site-specific, hand-made, and utterly unlike anything produced by any other process.
Earthen sculpture connects a place to the people who made it in a way that no other medium does. It uses the most local of materials — clay from the ground, sand from the river, straw from the field — and transforms them into something that will outlast everyone involved in making it. Cob sculpture weathers beautifully, developing a patina over time that only adds to its presence. It is also deeply participatory — these pieces are often made with many hands, which gives them a different kind of energy than work made by a single artist in a studio.
Every earthen sculpture starts with a conversation about what it wants to be and where it lives. An armature of wood, metal, or stone forms the structural core. Cob is applied in layers, built up and carved back, until the form emerges. Detail work happens in the final stages — surface texture, carved lines, embedded objects, color. The finished piece is sealed with a lime wash or earthen plaster to protect it from weather. The process is slow, iterative, and deeply satisfying.
A note on timelines: any time frames mentioned here are for the active hands-on work only. Natural building happens in stages, and each stage needs time before the next one can begin — drying time, curing time, weather windows. A project that takes a few days of work can take several weeks or months from start to finish. The timeline follows the material, not the calendar. We talk through realistic expectations as part of every first conversation.