Gas cans, teacups, paint tubes, ballpoint pens, lightbulbs. You may think you know how Joe Sheehan’s hyper-realistic stone carvings will feel to the touch. But you probably will be surprised.
Take a glowing green lightbulb, hanging from the usual brass fittings and electrical cord. Rather than being nearly weightless glass, it is carved from one chunk of hard, cold nephrite jade.
A retro green cassette was hewn from pounamu (the Māori word for several types of hard green stone — including jade — found in New Zealand). If a working cassette player could be found, you might be able to hear the sound of the Haast River, on the western coast of the South Island of New Zealand, where the pounamu was found.
As a young adult, Mr. Sheehan, now 48, carved pounamu and other materials into jewelry and small objects with traditional Māori motifs for Mountain Jade, his father’s shop in Rotorua, a lakeside town on the North Island that is popular with tourists for its natural hot springs and Māori cultural experiences.
“It was a really interesting time,” Mr. Sheehan said during an interview in February at the Auckland workshop where he was preparing eight large-scale pieces, called “Lost & Found,” for display in the city center. “Actually, it kind of fed into my current practice, because I ended up feeling with my own work that I shouldn’t directly lean on Māori design language, as a Pakeha.” (Pakeha is the Māori word for a New Zealander of European descent.)
“The shop had these Māori artifacts in it and historical imagery and information, like a little museum, and we were sitting behind glass, carving away, like a living anthropological exhibit,” he said. “I think that’s why, for my own practice, I started making these modern artifacts, everyday objects like the pen and the tape.”
“The Right Avenues”
Lewis Gardiner, a tohunga whakairo, or expert carver, said, “The cool thing about Joe is that he has really evolved his own style.” Now the owner of the Rotorua carving collective Rakai Jade and one of New Zealand’s most respected pounamu artists, Mr. Gardiner worked alongside Mr. Sheehan at Mountain Jade in the late 1990s.
“Joe never really went fully down the route of carving Māori motifs, even back then,” Mr. Gardiner said. “He already had a different way of thinking, looking at different types of forms, inspired by New Zealand’s environment but also influences from around the world.”
“I’ve got a lot of respect for him and how he goes down the right avenues to source New Zealand stone,” he added. “Yes, he’s Pakeha, but he understands the tikanga about connecting to the stone,” Mr. Gardiner said, referring to Māori cultural lore, “and asking the tangata whenua for permission to use it.” (Tangata whenua is the Māori term for people of the land, including the iwi, the largest social unit, and the hapu, smaller local units.)
Mr. Sheehan is now based in Wellington, the country’s capital, and he has some studio assistants who work with him on large projects. But for “Lost & Found,” he traveled alone through the country to find large boulders of basalt, marble, granite and argillite.
“Argillite was the primary toolmaking material for South Island Māori, so it’s a really important material historically,” Mr. Sheehan said. “It’s an amazing carving stone, because it’s so fine and tight and hard. And it’s this extraordinary bluish green, but with this awesome rust-orange skin, or rind. But my attempt to source from iwi had mixed success.”
When he approached the iwi, Ngai Tahu, its members asked whether he had a permit from the local council, and when he replied that he had wanted to ask the iwi first, it turned out that no one had ever done that before. After scores of emails over several months, it turned out that the iwi couldn’t give Mr. Sheehan what he wanted, which essentially was a blessing to use the stone.
“The size of boulder I wanted had to come from the big council quarry, and for the iwi, the quarry is not of their world,” he said. Eventually, he just got a council permit — but he also made a piece from the local stone and presented it to the iwi. In his work, “it’s the relationship-building part of it that I most love,” Mr. Sheehan said.
A Deconstructed Figure
In April, after 12 months of carving, “Lost & Found” was installed permanently along about a 400-meter (about 1,300-foot) stretch of Federal Street in Auckland, a central, semi-pedestrianized zone busy with commuters, tourists and a number of homeless people being supported by the nearby City Mission, a large charitable organization.
The eight hunks of rock are all about waist-high, and the largest weighs more than four tons. Out of each flat, polished surface emerges an everyday item: a pair of sneakers, each on its own rock and with its laces undone; two leather gloves, also shown separately; a bunched-up puffer jacket; a cap; a backpack; and a pair of sunglasses, all carved in realistic relief and in actual size.
“Together, the works make up a sort of deconstructed figure in belongings,” said Mr. Sheehan, who had been commissioned by the Auckland Council to create the series in 2000, but was delayed by the pandemic. “It was an unusual call for the council to make, to commission this series to be installed where they are, because it’s where the Auckland City Mission is.
“At first, I hung out on the street for a few days, just making notes, and I saw that there were a lot of homeless people. There’s also maybe 700 people who live on that street, all going about their business, so it’s also a domestic space, but there are these two worlds there, just sliding past each other, the haves and the have-nots.”
He said that his task was to make the installation look like the distinctive social makeup of the street: “You can’t just ignore the fact that these people are in need. And we’re all only a few bits of bad luck away from finding ourselves in the same situation. So they are us, and we are them. I wanted to make — quite literally — touchstones for everybody who is in that space. I deliberately chose things that could be anyone’s, so I chose quite ubiquitous items.”
And touchstones they have become. Passers-by often run their hands over the works, which include a backpack that seems to melt into the stone, its strap half-submerged in the rock’s flat surface.
To create the pieces, Mr. Sheehan initially used a five-foot blade to block out the rough shape of the rock, then a nine-inch angle grinder, going down in size until the finest detail of each item was picked out with tiny, diamond-coated burrs attached to a hand-held micromotor.
Tim Melville owns a gallery in Auckland that bears his name and has represented Mr. Sheehan since 2007. “People can’t quite believe that a human being is able to do this,” he said. “It was the same for me when I first saw ‘Lost & Found.’ I actually got quite emotional.”
Varied Materials
For a selling exhibition at Mr. Melville’s gallery in December 2023, Mr. Sheehan created “Surface Tension,” a series of 48 carved stone objects that look like the parts of canisters and bottles that would be visible if they were floating on water. (They range in price from 2,500 to 19,500 New Zealand dollars, about $1,510 to $11,800).
He found some of the raw stone in Yunfu, a city in Guangdong Province in southeastern China, with the help of his friend Zhang Sen Cai, a master carver.
Yunfu, Mr. Sheehan said, is the “largest stone-processing city in the country, where stone from all over the world gets processed and cut up for buildings and bench tops.”
“I’d go to these super-fancy showrooms,” he said, “and they’d soon realize I was mad and had no money, but eventually we met a guy who had a cousin who had a little factory and out the back, in the street, were guys picking over these piles of material. So we went from these fancy showrooms to the back streets, and next thing we’re all having lunch and talking about what I was trying to do.”
The collection — in materials as varied as pale pink Iranian onyx, mottled blue sodalite from Canada and dark green New Zealand argillite — was displayed on the glossy concrete floor of Mr. Melville’s gallery.
“We actually made every vessel perfect and whole, got them all together in the studio and then spent about a week sawing them up at angles so they’d look like they were floating,” Mr. Sheehan said. “And there was something really powerful in that, that kind of letting go of this perfect, precious, whole thing, putting it under the saw and having to make a call really quickly on where to sever it.”
This month, Mr. Sheehan started a two-month artists’ residency in Utica, N.Y.
“I’ll be doing some research and looking for some local stone,” he said. “I’ve already made friends with the head of the geology department at the local university. I’ll do some field work. I want to visit this giant dolomite outcrop, which is peppered with these unique double-terminated quartz crystals.
“I’ve got these drawings I’ve been sitting on for ages, to do with steel and stone together. There are five other artists in the cohort from all different backgrounds and practices. It should be pretty interesting.”
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