Perhaps it was growing up in a house dating back to the 1740s that gave Allison Steel the deep connections to early American history and tradition that permeate her work. Her family's home in New Braintree, MA (pop. 800) was always full of handmade antique objects and art materials. Her parents are both artists and art teachers, and as a child Allison reveled in the drawing challenges they would present: "I remember my dad giving me a very round stone, a pencil and paper and asking me to draw the stone and have it look like a rock, not a ball or a potato."
From the time she was a young teenager until her mid-twenties, Allison worked as a costumed interpreter of history at Old Sturbridge Village Museum. She introduced visitors to daily life in early 19th century New England, demonstrating music, domestic and farm work, and traditional handcrafts. At the museum, Allison was further immersed in the material culture of early New England: both the physicality of household goods and the slow processes by which these objects are made and tasks are accomplished.
In 1997 Allison encountered Sacred Harp singing, a centuries-old social hymn-singing practice. As Allison immersed herself in the local singing community and the history of the tradition, she organized a weekly singing atSmith College that still thrives, chaired the 2002 and 2006 Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Conventions, and performed with other singers on the 2004 Academy Awards. She continues to share her love for and knowledge of the tradition by teaching singing schools throughout the northeast. The themes that the hymn texts confront and explore, such as fellowship, suffering, love, death, and joy, all as experienced by individuals and communities, seeped into her art.
In college, while working on a project for Historic Northampton, her passion for Sacred Harp and her long time interest in gravestone art collided. Allison was creating a virtual web tour of the historic Bridge Street Cemetery when she encountered a stone carved with some familiar words-- a couplet by Isaac Watts and a popular Sacred Harp text: “Why should we mourn departing friends/ Or shake at deaths alarms / ‘Tis but the sound that Jesus sends / To call them to his arms.” “I had been singing this text over and over,” Allison explains, “and when you know a song and see the words written you can’t help but hear the sound of the song in your head. Standing alone in this quiet graveyard, looking at this stone that had been standing quietly for 200 years I was struck by the memory of this huge sound. And what I’d normally read as arbitrary religious funerary poetry struck me, because of my personal connections to this song, as specifically and deeply intimate.” An inanimate antique object of cold stone suddenly had a voice, and connections between mourning, monuments, and music were forged in this instant. “All of these connections were so vital to me that I’ve been making art about all of these same things ever since.” Indeed, Allison’s 1999 senior exhibition at Smith College, entitled “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere,” showcased quilted and embroidered fabric gravestone rubbings and included a performance of traditional Sacred Harp singing.
It wasn’t until 2005, while attending a workshop led by master carver and gravestone cutter Karin Sprague, that Allison began working in slate. That weekend she chiseled her first letters-- a stone that reads “I AM.” Immediately drawn to the laborious, painstaking, careful process of bringing words and images to slate, and the weighty substance of the stone itself, Allison adopted carving as one of her primary media. She is one of only about a dozen artists in America still practicing this ancient art of carving letters by hand.
Allison has carved slate memorials commissioned to mark births, wedding anniversaries, and deaths. She continues to explore the gravestone as a format for self-portraiture, as the voice of a departed loved one, or as a tribute to the dead.
Allison presented her work at the 2006 Association for Gravestone Studies Annual Conference, and gave a lecture entitled “Songs in Stone: My Work in Carving and Singing, Hymn Texts and Early New England Gravestones.” From that point until 2010 she worked as a gravestone conservator for Monument Conservation Collaborative, restoring hundreds of early gravestones all over NY and New England. "Working as a gravestone restorer has allowed me to interact with old stones in a different way," Allison explains. "Previously I'd been attracted to them visually, academically, conceptually, and spiritually. As a carver, I feel I'm not much more physically connected and I look at the carvings with a much deeper physical understanding of what the artist did to achieve the result I see. But as a conservator I also have a kind of motherly relationship to the stones, where I pull them up off the ground, prop them back up, wipe off their faces and send them on their way to hopefully last another 200 years."
Allison now lives with her family and carves in Old Chatham, New York.