BRICK BY BRICK

A gateway to knowledge, maturity and futures untold unfolds brick by brick in Chatham, VA.  The skill and expertise of all the ages has built a fortress of an entrance, a bridge and a work of engineering art. The eye is fooled by the majesty of bending bricks as they lay and overlay, curving and bending lending their solidity to the illusion. Month by month, brick by brick the gateway has raised it's form under the diligent hands of skilled artisans who's stories remain untold.  A story-book entrance is writing an invitation to adulthood, to education, to cultural experiences.  Higher hard skills meet higher soft skills and welcome awaits each on the other side of the precipice.  Chatham Hall has commissioned a fairy tale gate to the future.

Leaf by leaf green appears and each growing soldier stands in lock step with the next in calibrated rows.  Uniformly curved across the sloping hill, they spread their wings and grow.  Week by week the layers form, marking time with the sun.  The rain falls, the sun shines, the soldiers grow.   These emerald spectacles have no mind, no emotions, no pain,  They are unwitting players in a centuries old game.  It is everything in one compact product: glamour, power, relaxation, sex appeal.  Dark hands from across the ocean tended and tilled it, and; it filled their days with pain and fear.  Those hands traveled here in ships just like the layers of gold leaf piled one on top of another in the carts carrying it to market.  Backs were beaten, families were decimated. It caused a war! Such natural beauty nurtured by human hands wreaks havoc on the human condition, from its’ very beginnings to this day: from slave labor, to destruction of the human body, to ecology, to illegal trafficking, to addiction, to profiteering.Statesmen tax it, laws relax it, doctors tell us what the facts is.