September 10, 2025
By Michelle Madden
“Oh look, they’ve built a nest in there,” observes George Hendricks. “Nothing brings me greater joy.” We watch swallows dip into nooks in the cedar arch that Hendricks built at New Morning Market in Woodbury. Hendricks is a landscape sculptor for whom nature is his muse. He works with profound reverence for his environment, in an almost religious way. “I like to think that I do not build things. I just listen to the materials, and they tell me what they want to be.”
His formal training was at Rice University, but his most significant influence was his time in Kyoto, Japan. His asymmetrical, temple-style arches reflect this, but more so his deep symbiotic relationship with his environment. “Nature will always win,” says Hendricks, “Obey her and she will return your love a million fold.”
Hendricks has the body of a woodsman, with forearms bearing evidence of a lifetime of lifting and cradling hundred-pound pieces of stone. His long hair is tied back, his wide eyes serene and kind. He is of another time, when the Earth felt sacred and the artisan was revered. He speaks about a tree giving him “permission” to build a pergola beneath it, and chides himself for not “listening” to the stone when it pushed back as he tried to build a path into it. He is loath to waste, and rescues lost material: a chopped-down cedar about to be fed to the wood chipper, unused curbing from roadways, discarded wire from Eversource.
His projects are rarely small and never simple. Mastering feats of engineering, though, is something of a familial distinction. Hendrick’s grandfather, Karl Koch III, played a crucial role in the steel supply and the building of the World Trade Center (Hendricks’ design for a memorial made it through the early rounds). His parents, whom he describes as “the kindest souls that ever lived,” were artists, and as a tribute to them, he is designing Winterwood Nature Preserve—a 16-acre sanctuary and artists residence on the grounds of his Woodbury home.
Hendricks tends to attract clients for whom anything is possible and nothing is compromised. Emily Frick calls him a “genius of engineering,” and commissioned a 20-by-16- foot ellipse-shaped fountain inspired by the Italian architect Bernini (who designed St. Peter’s square at the Vatican). For Hope Winthrop, he created a Living Gate consisting of undulating branches, and a Stone Menagerie—a collection of forest creatures chipped from stone surrounding an expansive vernal pool requiring 300 tons of granite.
“He is a magician,” says Winthrop. The economist H. “Woody” Brock describes him as “the most distinguished sculpture of his kind in America.” On Brock’s estate he constructed a 40-foot tall obelisk in the middle of a water-filled quarry, clad with hand-hammered copper, topped with a granite bird taking flight, signifying the triumph of nature over man. It is called Sing.
All his creations are given a name. Like a poem. Written with stone. —hendrickssculpture.com
