Once the preserve of solitary beachcombers, stone-balancing has, over the last decade or so, evolved into a serious sculptural discipline – one that blurs the line between artistry, engineering and meditation.
“It’s the art of balancing stones in unusual and interesting ways,” explains Adrian Gray, the pioneer of the medium who began working with weathered stones in 1999. “Before my website, there was nothing on the internet about stone-balancing and contrary to what people might think it has never been an ancient or indigenous art.”
Having sold his expedition company at the turn of the millennium – a business that specialised in ‘firsts’ like swimming across a volcanic caldera lake in the Philippines or rafting a river from source to sea in Madagascar – Devon-born Gray happened across stone-balancing purely by chance on local beaches.
He began exploring the art form himself before photographing his creations. Gray says: “I committed a lot more time in curating a collection of images of my work on the coast, which resulted in exhibitions of prints in the UK and abroad, most notably at Art Trove in Singapore. The popularity of these prints inevitably led me to begin creating more permanent stone-balancing sculptures.”
