Grave Work: Gravestone Girls finds beauty in the macabre

In summer 2018, I was walking around the Providence Flea with one of my best friends when we came across a booth toward the end of the market. A lone woman stood, surrounded by some of the most beautiful art pieces, all castings taken from New England gravestones. I stopped dead in my tracks (sorry, I had to get that pun in) and met the woman behind it all, Brenda Sullivan. I recently talked to her about the gravestone casts and the business she created from them — Gravestone Girls.

Brenda grew up in Massachusetts and lived near a cemetery that held family gravestones. While her mother and grandmother took care of the family plot, she would play in the cemetery. As the years passed, she became more attached to a few of the stones. “I had a couple of gravestones I wanted to replicate, in the third dimension — that I wanted to bring home.” So 20 years ago, Gravestone Girls had its genesis.

Each Gravestone Girls gravestone cast is a three dimensional art piece that almost gives the feeling of holding an actual gravestone. The majority of their castings are from New England gravestones. My favorite part, and the part that Brenda says makes the eyes of her customers light up the most, is that on the back of each piece is a small history of the grave from which the casting was taken, and on the Gravestone Girls website, you can find a picture of the original gravestone used in the casting.

Brenda has an art history and a restoration background, so she’s careful with every gravestone she uses. “We work to get permission from whoever oversees the burial ground. We don’t just walk in and do whatever, or take whatever.” How do they make the castings? Brenda laughed, telling me it was a secret, but then said, “I’ll tell you a brief overview. I found materials that are safe for what I’m doing. I take an impression from the face of the stone… Once I have my impression I can take it home and replicate it from there.”

The Gravestone Girls work has become so popular that Brenda is on the road most weekends to different markets around the country. “There’s been an explosion of the oddities markets,” she says. I asked her what people outside New England think of these art pieces and she said, “People in other parts of the country don’t see [gravestones] this old. They dig it. The oldest piece in my collection is a winged skull from a gravestone with a death date of 1691. He’s really popular.” She finds that people often connect with something about a piece — be it a name, or a date, or even an image — all taken from someone’s final resting place.

For Brenda, though, it’s not just about having a macabre art piece. She focuses on the meaning behind each of the pieces that she has. “Gravestones reflect a society at large — what they’re doing with their lives and certainly how they feel about death and their own mortality.”

The Gravestone Girls website is a draw for any cemetery enthusiast. “In addition to the pieces we do, I do gravestone rubbing classes, lead cemetery tours and lecture about the evolution of cemeteries.” As you can imagine, their October is pretty full.

At the flea that summer, I got “The Seven Stars of Bolton,” a piece from a gravestone dated 1793 and found in Old South Cemetery in Boston, and I’ve curated an entire wall around it, all based on mortality, death and what it means to have limited time on this planet. That’s really what Gravestone Girls is behind, too. They are about preserving our history through their art — and reminding us that our time here on earth may be more finite than we realize, and I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to live it up.

For more information, gravestonegirls.com