You have to know the rules in order to break them.

One starts by learning the rules of the craft of dry stone walling, intently studying the lessons of how to build a structure that is safe and sound. Only then can the craft be “stretched into art,” stresses Jared Flynn.

The Ewing Arts Award recipient this year in the folk and traditional arts category, Flynn has been perfecting his craft of dry stone walling into art for 30 years now.

“It can be both safe and beautiful,” he explained. “That’s the rub between the craft and the art.”

In dry stone walling, structures are built using only various types of stone, employing the forces of gravity and friction to hold the stone pieces together. It’s a practice that’s been used for hundreds of years throughout the world.

“You don’t do it as a job. It’s passion-driven,” he said. “You have to love it.”

Born in Canada and raised in Brattleboro, Flynn has resided in Dummerston, Vt., for 25 years, raising two now-adult daughters with his wife, Elizabeth Catlin, an investment adviser. They met on Flynn’s 25th birthday, he fondly recalled, adding that he “never looked back.”

He’s been building walls since his early 20s and began right out of high school after getting his start in garden design, where he initially took an interest in plant propagation. Often, gardens needed walls, so he built a couple, fascinated by the process that no one he spoke with seemed to know anything about.

Jared Flynn, a dry stone waller, is the winner of a 2022 Ewing Arts Award in the category of folk and traditional arts. Video by Justin Altman.

Once he met a couple of old-school wallers, he officially “got the bug,” he says, adding of his transition from seeds to stone, “Plants die. Walls don’t.”

He was invited to a workshop by Dan Snow, another Dummerston, Vt., resident who became his mentor and pointed out that everything he had been doing in walling for the past five years was wrong.

“I was the worst waller,” Flynn recalled. “It was painful. I had to learn the right way to stop the heartache.”

In stone, he found freedom and magic, but also a responsibility to protect the world’s oldest natural resource.

“The waller doesn’t dictate the design, the material dictates the design,” Flynn said, adding that the process starts through the identification of the materials and their value, looking at a pile of stone and choosing a wall style that will maximize those materials through design. That’s where the art lives, he says.

A professional member of the Dry Stone Walling Association (DSWA) of Great Britain, Flynn holds his master craftsman certification in the craft, as well as a journeyman certificate from the Dry Stone Conservancy of Kentucky. He has worked professionally in residential and commercial dry stone walling construction for decades, collaborating with engineers, architects, garden designers and homeowners.

Remarking on his notable skill of integrating stonework into landscape, Flynn’s nominator Katie Cassidy Sutherland is a 2020 Ewing Arts Award recipient and a local architect.

“Jared Flynn is an incredible artist, designer, and leader in his medium of craft: stone work,” she wrote.

In 2010, Flynn founded The Stone Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to “preserve the art and craft of dry stone walling through an expanding program of educational events and outreach projects.” This local resource is the only facility in North America that provides year-round educational and DSWA certification opportunities for all levels and abilities. Although there are satellite schools in other states, his location is the largest educational provider on the continent.

“We’re just the messengers,” Flynn says of The Stone Trust’s opportunity to train others in his craft. Their workshops are taught in three different learning styles, modified for participants as needed, which has contributed greatly to their success, he said.

He worked with The Landmark Trust USA, the DSWA and The Stone Trust to build The Stone Trust Center at Scott Farm in Dummerston, a public space that is open year-round for visitors and also provides high-level dry stone walling education at all levels.

It’s home to the most extensive collection of dry stone fences in North America. A map can be found both on-site at The Stone Trust and on its website that outlines other area stone structures.

The Landmark Trust USA had previously acquired and restored the neighboring Rudyard Kipling House, known as Naulakha, as well as Scott Farm, an heirloom apple orchard, when he pitched them the idea for a walling school. Not surprisingly, they were interested.

“We offer economic diversity,” he said of the partnership that brings hundreds of students to workshops every year. “How we preserve open land is by putting bodies on open land.”

He’s proud to be a DSWA-certified instructor for this uncompetitive community of walling enthusiasts and the pool of qualified instructors, although these days he spends most of his time as an examiner, assessing the work of test candidates. Additionally, he is The Stone Trust’s workshop and test site coordinator, which entails facilitating workshops and test days for candidates and examiners.

The world-recognized certification process is made up of four levels, each timed and increasingly more difficult. He is one of only six DSWA master craftsmen in North America, and the certification has established a known standard for historic preservation work and other structural building efforts.

“We train people’s eyes, so they know what to look for,” he said.

His second daughter is the youngest female in North America to be Level 1 certified, an accomplishment in the family legacy, he proudly recounts, that she wrote about for her Wake Forest University admissions process.

Stonework is an undervalued occupation, he’s found, and he classifies stone walling more as construction work than landscaping. The increasing harshness of the outdoor elements due to climate change makes the business harder each year, both the weather and the prevalence of ticks being deterrents. It’s also brutal on the feet.

“You really have to love it,” he said.

Wintertime is for passion projects. Currently and moving forward, he’s excitedly focused on public art and building interactive land art sculptures. These creative outlets are “stone structures that complement the landscape and surrounding area and invite the viewer to experience the integrated design,” his website explains.

His latest, Moon Bridge, was built over countless hours and is located at Green Mountain Orchards in Putney, Vt., with stunning views of Mount Monadnock. He utilized 100-year-old Vermont granite bridge abutments for the build that incorporated a Moon Gate, the name for a circular opening in a garden wall that allows pedestrians to pass through, traditional to Chinese gardens and full of spiritual meaning.

Interactive land art sculptures provide a space to connect visitors to the natural environment. The uniqueness of each visitor’s experience and connection to the piece and to the nature around it is where the passion for building them lies for Flynn.

“It’s about creating a destination,” Flynn said in defense of his sculpture, which some others have denounced as merely social media post backgrounds. “It’s about the conversations that people have walking to it and coming back from it. How do you put a value on that?”

He worked on the piece for two years, putting a hold on another passion project, the rebuilding of the Brattleboro Retreat Tower, in order to hastily retrieve the materials from a soon-to-be-sold storage site.

While not disappointed by the final result, he was saddened by the completion of the inspiring project.

He’s on the search for his next location and is excited about the possibility of building a Land Tilt, a cylindrical type of piece where half is submerged underground and half is raised above ground. He also takes inspiration from going out on the road to collaborate with other artists, such as Chris Miller, a stone carver out of Barre, Vt., and builder of The Stone Trucks.

“Building on the road is so fun because it’s fast, and there are no distractions,” he laughed. “Thank God my wife is so cool that I can disappear for days at a time.”

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