Lightbulbs and Cassette Tapes as Art

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