Artist defies gravity law

By Ankita

PATNA: People would laugh at you, if you say, ‘I can stick things together without glue.’ But this has happened not in fairy tales but in reality. Meet 36-year-old Michael Grab, an American gravity artist who balances stones without glue by challenging the phenomenon of gravity.

Grab has been doing this for years. “It started with an accident, I was hanging out with a friend in the city and we spontaneously started balancing stones on the road. I fell in love with that activity,” Grab said.

He began balancing stones as an art form in 2008. “I found it to be a unique and meditative therapy and decided to continue practicing it. Earlier, I used to work as a professional employee in a company. Then, in 2012, I quit the job as my art needed time, effort, and practice. It is a self-learned art through extensive practice over time and now it’s my full-time job even for my earning,” Grab said.

The most challenging part is to find the degree of focus required to achieve small contact points in complex structures. Because of that challenge, structures can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours to reach the required form.

“I prefer to use harder stones for balancing, so the natural edges can withstand the adjustments I need to make to center the mass properly. But for design, I prefer obscure shapes to make structures more interesting. The physical balance works like a camera tripod, where the mass is centered between three tiny contact edges, which can be found in the natural surface texture of the rocks. I never alter the rocks to make the balance. I always use the natural edges as they are, which is also why I prefer harder rocks,” the artist said.

Grab got inspiration from his mother’s quilt art. His passion for stone balancing led him to photography and film-making too. “I love to travel for my art,” he says. People may be intrigued by the impossibility of his work but, he says, “it’s not an impossible task. All you need is patience and practice.”

Grab never plans his artworks. “I let them rise spontaneously and approach my art in the moment, like a meditative yoga practice,” he said.

This story was first published in The Of Bennett, a student-run initiative of The Times School of Media, Bennett University.
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