Artist and carver Steve Stone lives in a little gray house with white trim on Hooper's Bay’s Blueberry Hill. It’s so similar to the dozen or so others in the Bering Sea coastal village that you might not notice it, were it not for the stacks of whalebone and driftwood outside.
“I collect all the walrus skulls, whale bone. I gotta get a really big whale bone down there,” Stone said, gesturing to a pile of natural materials. It’s what he picks from to piece together whale bone, driftwood, and other natural materials to create the masks, carvings, and sculptures he’s known for.
There's also something else in his yard: two large shipping containers, one blue and one bright orange. Soon they’ll become a full-fledged workshop.
Workspace is hard to come by anywhere, but in a remote community like Hooper Bay, which is facing a severe housing crisis, there’s almost no additional room for creativity.
Nine people live in his three bedroom home, a lively and chaotic space filled with children, grandchildren, and dogs.
“I made most of my stuff in the furnace room in my little place, but I didn't want to create so much ivory and wood dust and stuff all over. My wife started complaining,” Stone said.
For years, Stone taught high school shop classes in Hooper Bay. After hours, he would use the shop as a work space until a malfunction with the ventilation shut the school shop down. He still occasionally teaches a class or two. “Most things that I teach students is our traditional tools, how they used to use long ago like harpoons, paddles, sometimes how to make drums, dance fans, traditional weapons,” he said.
Stone's father was also an artist, and that is how he learned a lot of the skills he teaches today. He said that teaching itself is a tradition he's also passing along to his students.
“I always appreciate them and I praise them all the time, because they’re the ones to pass on their talents like I did to them. So they can pass on too when they grow up to have kids, they can pass on to them and then next generation,” Stone said.
A lot of Stone's work is on display at the school. In the library, he had to climb up on a chair to lift down a whale bone sculpture from its perch high on a bookshelf among a handful of shiny gold basketball trophies. “A bearded seal hunter,” he said as he scrambled down with the piece in his hands. “The bigger pieces are made from whale vertebrae of a bowhead, and this piece here is part of the tail, where the tail back side vertebrae is, where it connects to all the bones and stuff.”
It’s a complicated sculpture, actually made from three different whale bones. The large piece that forms the base is kind of shaped like an oblong star. Two points at the bottom form the feet. Stone hand-painted them to look like traditional seal-skin boots, called piluguqs in both the Yup’ik and Cup’ik language. Sometimes Stone uses acrylic paint, and sometimes he makes his own paint from natural pigments that he said are difficult to find in the soil and sediments under the tundra. “We find them up in the hillsides or somewhere. You have to be lucky to find one. It’s, like, under the permafrost, so we fry ‘em or bake it on the stove. And then you cook it, and then it'll turn color where you could make it light, medium, or dark color,” he said.
Two knobby points that stick out from the sides of that wide, star-shaped whale bone form the hunter’s mittened hands. Stone has painted them a deep chocolate brown. White rabbit fur encircles the hunter’s wrists, and he holds a tool in each mitten. “This is a harpoon with a sealskin rope and ice pick, the most important tool that our ancestors, these hunters use to go on the ice floes and check on the ice. And sometimes, when they go on a kayak, they use that end to hold on. All made out of whale baleen,” Stone explained
It’s all handmade. The large whalebone base supports another whale bone. It’s a round, flat disc, nearly as wide as a volleyball. It’s unpainted, and its whitish gray and mottled texture is perfect for creating the effect of the outer layer of a giant, fluffy, fur ruff. Nestled in the center of the bone disc is the hunter’s face, made from a third smaller, round whale bone, naturally ochre-orange in color, as if the hunter has been out in the spring sunshine. “And the hair, this has a hair right here, ptarmigan feathers,” explained Stone. The feathers of hair are set in just a way that it looks like this hunter is facing into the wind. “Everything is all detailed with raw materials. This is just, like, stuff, a parka ruff, and there we have it inlaid on the inside with land otter fur,” Stone said.
The hunter has high, round cheekbones, a nose, and a mouth in the shape of an "O." Leather strips with white feather tassels tumble out of his mouth. Stone said that this is a reflection of seal behavior.
“During mating season, during spring time, when they’re mating calls under the water, they make all those bubble sounds,” Stone said. “And they make all those unique sounds where they can lure a female. So that’s the mouth making those sounds as it hunts the bearded seal.”
The hunter wears snow goggles made from black baleen and he has two labrets, traditional facial piercings, on either side of his mouth. They are also handmade from small disks of ivory with baleen inlays.
“As an artist, it's just like a dream,” said Stone. “We look at the raw pieces, and then we look at them for a while to see what design we can use each part, each part of a whale bone to make the design like these. Just like a vision, to visualize how you want all the details and all the raw materials where they gonna be placed. And this is exactly how our ancestors, our forefathers used to go hunting, subsistence hunting like that, using all traditional stuff, raw materials.”
Lots of other pieces by Stone are also on display in the school. In the library, a large, hand-painted wooden carving of a puffin, framed and mounted on black velvet, hangs above the children’s book section. Ulus, earrings, and a few hand-carved ivory hunters in driftwood kayaks sit in a display case near the gymnasium, and there is a workshop just down the hall.
Back at his house, among the long lengths of graying driftwood and stacks of bone, Stone offers a tour of the two metal shipping containers in his front yard. He has big plans this summer.
“I’m gonna cut off a doorway here,” Stone explained as he pointed toward a wall inside one of them. Last year, he applied for a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation to build his own studio. Back at his house, he shows off his plans for the two shipping containers. “What I’m going to do, since this [container] is complete with all the lighting and plug-ins and all, it’s gonna be my main carving place. And the other side will be finishing touch stuff,” he said.
With a new dedicated space, Stone said that he can create a lot more. “I would make more, bigger things. Create more ideas of new artworks, masks, sculpture work. A lot of things in mind that I have to make with all raw materials and all those whale bones. I’m gonna make a lot of sculpture work on ‘em, and all those ribs I would create a lot of figurines on them,” he said.
If all goes according to plan, Stone could have his new studio up and running by the end of the summer.
This reporting was made possible through the CIRI Foundation’s Journey to What Matters grant program.
