“ There’s something very magical about the coast, specifically in Maine. How the forest grows all the way down to the sea.” Emily Freeman, principal artist and maker at Hagstone Design, pauses as if culling information from deep in her bones. “The ocean is moving all the time. It changes. The colors change. But the rocks are a stable, still presence. They’re the constant.”
Here she offers a unique take on the intertidal zone—that berth of wet rock and sand where earth meets sea, obscured and revealed time and again by the rise and fall of Maine’s famously voluminous tides. It’s a place of flux, shifting elements, and topographies that transform. Yet Freeman seeks the stillness in it all. “I really wanted to find a way to bring that sense of weight and calmness to the home.”
Lucky for us, she found it. “I had an idea for the very first of these pieces when I was swimming one winter.” She describes looking back at the shoreline from icy waters:bobbing like a selkie—those half-seal, half-human creatures of Celtic and Norse mythologies—Freeman marveled at the sheer stillness of the rocks keeping quiet vigil, heavy with the weight of time. “Stones are as old as you get…the oldest things we come into contact with. They’ve been around for billions and billions of years.” For as long as they’ve been around, however, it was in this exact moment that they became her muse.
When you encounter Freeman’s pieces, the sense of weight and calm she describes emerges almost viscerally.Not just seen but felt. The irony? Her primary medium is, in fact, hand-formed woolen felt. She uses natural undyed wool from sheep grazing the shorelines of her native U.K.to create these signature works: large-scale, sculptural wallhangings depicting uniquely balanced shoreline stones.Spanning up to five feet in either direction and monumental in their own right, these pieces play with contrasting opposites: the hardness of stone and the softness of wool, heaviness and lightness, immovable and flowing.
Such are the contrasting tones of Maine’s shifting shorelines where she continues to draw her inspiration.Freeman regularly hikes to remote coastal locations to make plein air paintings. “It’s quite intuitive,” she explains. “I try to paint what I feel. It can be the weather conditions, the light. It’s a flow state.” She then brings her impressions back to the studio and begins designing the work—“a distillation of the experience and vision into a piece.” Using chalk on the wall she draws formulations of stones, overlapping and piled either horizontally or vertically, then uses reclaimed construction materials to build a frame. At this point she begins to add layers of raw wool using a traditional wet felting technique first developed by seafaring cultures in the northern latitudes. Slowly, and in this manner, Freeman finally creates the softly rounded stones she’s known for.
To the ancients, a hagstone—the namesake of Freeman’s creative enterprise—is a rock worn through with a hole by the incessant rolling of the ocean’s briny waves. Some say that when you look through it you can see into another world. Freeman’s stone-inspired wall hangings are no different. Large, spacious, and quiet, they are statement pieces for the ages. These works inspire a sense of peace and timelessness, whether taking center stage in the front hall or living room, or bringing stillness and ultimate calm to a bedroom or even home office. You can experience these one-of-a-kind works with your own felt sense atArtemis Gallery in Northeast Harbor, or Carver Hill Gallery in Rockland. And if you’re lucky enough to claim a Hagstone Design piece of your own, you can be sure that just like the stones that mark our rocky shores, it will offer your space astable, still presence for years to come. ▪
