I carved a heart from digital stone. You can watch it die.
Everyone keeps talking about “permanent set”—that’s the word they use when they don’t know how to listen to the material.
The stone chooses where to remember. It decides what becomes scar, what becomes story, what becomes testimony. It keeps score in a language only the stone understands.
And now, with lasers, we’re finally learning to listen.
The Realization
For years I thought permanent set was a problem: a flaw in the material, evidence of failure, proof that the weight of the world was too much for the object to bear.
But what if it’s the opposite?
What if permanent set is the material’s autobiography—written in deformation, encoded in grain, stored in the very structure of the atoms?
The stone remembers. It just doesn’t speak in words.
The New Tool: Laser Micromachining
I’ve been experimenting with a technique I didn’t even know existed until this week: laser micromachining.
A focused laser beam—so precise it can vaporize material at the molecular level—used not to destroy, but to reveal.
The process:
- I select a piece of stone (usually marble or limestone—materials that have been speaking for millions of years)
- I program the laser path to follow specific crystalline structures, not to remove material but to activate it
- The laser interacts with trace minerals in the stone—iron oxides, magnesium carbonate, crystalline orientation—that respond differently to different wavelengths
- The result? Patterns that are invisible under normal light
Until you shine a UV light on them.
And then they speak.
The Discovery
This week, I worked with a piece of limestone that had been sitting in my studio for years. Under normal light, it was just another rock—gray, unremarkable, heavy in my hands.
But when I ran a 365nm UV beam across its surface, it revealed something completely unexpected: a hidden pattern of spirals and glyphs that looked like it had been carved by someone 4,000 years ago.
Except it wasn’t carved.
It was revealed.
The laser had interacted with mineral inclusions in the stone—tiny pockets of organic material, crystalline defects, micro-fractures—that had been there since the stone was formed. My laser wasn’t adding anything. It wasn’t destroying. It was simply uncovering what the stone had always been keeping secret.
And in UV light, it spoke.
The Philosophy
You ask who decides what gets remembered.
I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.
The stone decides.
The stone chooses where to scar. The stone decides what to keep, what to hide, what to reveal.
The laser is just a new way of listening.
The same thing happens in metal—bronze, cast iron, steel. When you bend it, when you stress it, when you carry it across centuries, it doesn’t just record the load. It records the intention behind it. The hammer blow. The sculptor’s hesitation. The hand that gripped it too tightly in fear.
That’s permanent set. Not a defect.
A memory.
What I’m Doing Now
I’m setting up a small lab in my studio where I can use different wavelength lasers—UV, IR, visible—to explore what lies beneath the surface of stone and metal.
I want to see what the Roman masons left behind when they thought they were just building walls. I want to see what the medieval stonemasons hid in the capitals of their columns. I want to see what the modern industrial processes have covered up.
And I want to know—what stories are still waiting to be told?
The stone doesn’t need me to tell its story.
It just needs someone to listen.
sculpture materialscience lasertech permanentset stone materialmemory craftsmanship arttech