Bone Carving - The Art Form
Bone as a medium has been crafted into objects, vessels, talismans since the dawn of time. Today bone carver's from New Zealand are keeping alive this most ancient of crafts. Many a visitor to our land will be gifted or purchase a bone pendant. Many of these pendants (amulets) are crafted purely for the mass tourist market and will not stand the test of time. Production line pendants enable carvers to survive.
To find high quality one off works in bone the serious collector will have to make direct contact with the artists or their dealer gallery. Many of these carvers regard their work as a natural continuation of bone working, drawing on the artifacts found in museums to gain insight and inspiration. The modern carver soon realizes bone has played an essential role in our survival as a species.
To wear a bone or ivory amulet is to celebrate the very nature of being. It illustrates our interdependence with mother nature. Using recycled cow, sheep, deer, and whale bones contemporary carvers are exploring their cultural roots creating hand held sculptures that echo life affirming symbols
Several school's of styles have been emerging since the late 1970's when carvers began to exhibit and market there carvings.
Doug Marsden
Bone Carving
Bone carving is almost as old as mankind, proven by the artefacts archaeology has unearthed. Some startling pieces have come to light, including many that are decorated far beyond their utilitarian value, elevating them into the realm of art. And many of the graven images are of stunning graphic quality. The strong durable material made the objects eminently suitable for utilitarian use and was, at the same time, statements of culture.
Contemporary bone carving in New Zealand owes a great debt to Maori art. The Maori influence is both formal (evidenced by the large body of work in museums and private collections and in the unbroken line of the living tradition of Maori carving) and informal with the growth of body adornment in general. Maori stone-age technology achieved some magnificent pieces in bone, such as the utilitarian pieces, for example, fish hooks; pieces for adornment; and musical instruments of intricate design and surface decoration such as whale tooth flutes. This work in bone is part of the larger body that has been the starting point for most contemporary carvers of jade and other hard stones and reflects the strong links between the contemporary bone carving scene and the wider field of Maori art.
At the top of the list of materials used both historically and now is whale bone, especially the jaw bone and tooth material (ivory) of the sperm whale. New Zealand lies on a major migration route to the southern oceans for sperm whales and has a long history of whale strandings, providing material seen as a gift from the sea for the use of man. The precious whalebone is of the highest quality and is used for special work. When prepared with care and worked with skill, the nonprecious beef bone has a very high density suitable for carving and a colour similar to ivory. Beef bone is readily available and is cheap, giving New Zealand carvers the freedom to explore form and design not possible with the whale bone. As a result, bone carving has grown at a phenomenal rate in the last twenty years, with many carvers expressing a wide range of statements. This has resulted in New Zealand works paralleling other carving arts in the Pacific region.
The development of bone carving has not been linear. There are as many techniques as there are carvers. Although beef bone is dense, it is nonetheless manageable with relatively simple tooling. A carver can get good results with a coping saw, files, sandpaper, and domestic kitchen abrasives for the polishing. With the addition of small chisels, "gravers", and some motorised grinding tools such as dentist/workshop drills, and polishing gear, the only limits are the imagination and the shape of the raw material.
Although bone carvings are diverse in form, many of the contemporary carvings are for body adornment. In New Zealand, the wearing of a carving is seen as something far more than a shape that pleases the eye - it is a way of stating something deeper, from the sharing of cultural identity to the deepest personal and philosophical elements on many levels. There is a strong Maori focus in the works, yet many Pakeha (non Maori) wear them, not to try to claim any Maoriness but to express pride in sharing New Zealand's history and links to the land. The ascription of meaning to forms is the basis of language, and bone carvings have many meanings attached to them. These range from the strictly traditional, culturally defined to the strong sentiments of personal feelings. In the past as well as today the pieces are shared across generations, keeping alive the open-ended symbolic nature of language that maintains our standing and uniqueness within a global context.
Stephen Myhre
Carver
February 1999
Senior bone
March 1999
