I am honored to have served as the Curator of the Spirits & Stone Collection for the past decade, volunteering my time and heart to promoting Shona stone carving which I believe to be a world heritage art-form.

At a showing of over one hundred sculptures of the Spirits & Stone Collection several years ago in New York, one incredulous guest who had spent several hours meandering through the exhibit asked me: “Where do I begin to make up my mind for one of these sculptures?” and, believing that I owned the sculptures, she asked me how it felt to possess so many breathtaking pieces of art?

For the first question, there are as many answers as pieces in this collection. In the end, it is about the voice that finds your deepest resonance, the spirit that speaks to you... While this art is visually stunning, it is hard to truly appreciate without the tactile experience of running your hands over the lines, curves and rough surfaces, feeling the cool ‘energy signature’ of the stone itself, perceiving its incredible weight and density, its ‘permanence’…

As to the second question, over the years I have come to believe one cannot ‘own’ such sculptures; rather, one becomes their temporary ‘custodian’. Consider that the raw stone from which these sculptures are crafted has existed for millennia before us, and will endure a thousand years after we are gone from this earth. We are, for a fleeting moment in historical time, merely the ‘custodians’ of this wonderful art, bequeathing it to our children, and they to their children. And in that way our memory endures, living eternally with the spirits in the stone.