RURAL ARTISAN
A DIY apprenticeship propelled Zoë Wilson from disenchanted art graduate to award-winning stone carver. Now, her craft features everywhere from Whitehall and Westminster to Windsor Castle
When Zoë Wilson’s husband Phil was posted to Brunei for two years in 2016, she agreed to go with him on one condition: she must take as much stone with her as she could. She had just graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School and, at 31, had finally found her calling as a stone carver. In their shipping container, stone took priority. The sofa got left behind.
It had taken Zoë a good few years to find her niche. Her initial degree, at Birmingham City University, had been in fine art painting. It wasn’t a good fit. “It was very conceptual,” Zoë says. “What I didn’t realise at the time was that I liked the craft aspect, the process.” That realisation came after graduating, in 2007, when she moved back home to Shropshire and took a job in a granite workshop: “I loved producing something using the tools.”
Zoë went on to work for a stonemason, before helping a friend extend his house on the Welsh borders by making new stonework, including mullion windows. Around the same time, she met a local letter carver, John Neilson, and struck up an informal apprenticeship. “A lot of his work was on headstones and he hated using angle grinders, so I shaped them for him,” Zoë says. Eventually, she picked up her chisel and mallet to start carving the letters that John had drawn: “When he came along to finish them off, I felt the less he had to do, the better.” Through John, she heard about the diploma in historic stone carving at City & Guilds. Her first term, in 2013, was a revelation: “All the skills I’d been gaining were the ones I needed on the course. It was hugely satisfying. I’d been slightly lost until that point. Then I thought, ‘This is it!’”
SCHOOL OF ROCK
Zoë soon met Phil, who was in the Army Air Corps. When students were invited to design a new gargoyle for St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, Phil was serving in Afghanistan and Zoë based her design on the eagle on his cap badge. It was one of three chosen to be installed. “I spent the summer holiday carving it,” Zoë recalls. “I was worrying about him and it was better to allow myself to carve and think about him at the same time.” She hasn’t seen it in situ as it’s not in a public area of the chapel, but she can proudly point out her restoration work on other landmarks, including the Houses of Parliament and the Cabinet Office.
A significant moment came in Zoë’s final year
