Scott Aho is a multi-disciplinary artist primarily focused on our experience in and interface with nature.   He sources the basalt rock for his sculptures near his home in southern Utah.  Making minimal interventions with hand- and power tools, he seeks to provoke our visceral and imaginative response by releasing form and stories from within the rock.  

“I have been a professional working artist in sculpture and the photographic arts for forty-five years. I've worked in stone, wood, metal, earth and fabric.

I'm currently completing a commissioned four-ton stone sculpture for a community center in Utah.

The landscape in southern Utah is the driving inspirational force as well as the material source for my work.  I work with earth-derived materials: stones and sticks, mostly. Simple forms.

I hunt for the stones around where I live and drag them home where I try to get a sense of what the stone and I can say together.  What story needs to come out? The stories in the sculptures are only hinted at. Some pieces seem to have a functional element. But what for?  In the end, the viewer holds the possibility of filling in the blanks. 

It's like we do a little dance, the stones and I, about the interface between the humans and the stones. And the sculptures are, in a way, the hard copy of that dance.

The stone is basalt. Volcanic, 25,000 years old. All that time being broken, tumbled, smoothed and scattered since the Ice Age.  Baked, frozen, sand-scoured, inhabited by microbes and lichen. All this history is in the surface and down to the core of these rock sculptures. They are like islands with unique landscapes, unique flora, voids and symbols. Small autonomous worlds traveling around the sun.”