"Bones" Carved Fossilized Whale Bone Skull Sculpture — L'Aquart × Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio

A skull carved from fossilized whale bone — bone made stone by deep time, returned to the form of a skull. One of one.

The object

"Bones" carries the skull theme to its most literal material: it is carved from fossilized whale bone — the mineralized skeletal remains of a prehistoric whale — with supporting metalwork executed in vermeil. To cut a human skull from the fossil bone of a leviathan is exactly the kind of closed loop the series prizes: bone returning as bone, the memento and its material one and the same substance.

The material

Fossilized whale bone forms over millions of years as mineral-bearing groundwater replaces the original organic tissue cell by cell, preserving the porous, cellular architecture of living bone within a hardened matrix. Where silicification is advanced the material approaches the hardness and polish of agate, and the fossil structure reads across the carved surface as a fine natural patterning that no two pieces share — a record of the animal written into the stone.

The series — Faces of Eternity

Few symbols carry the universal recognition or the suggestive charge of the skull: archetype and memento mori, relic and warning, calavera and battle trophy, the seat of personality and the face of eternity. "Faces of Eternity" is Quispe Aparicio's answer to that long iconography — a set of skulls, each carved from a different natural gemstone, given attitude and personality: a wink at mortality rather than a solemn bow to it. The concept took several years simply to gather rough of sufficient size, interest and integrity to carve, then a year at the bench, each skull requiring one to three months and its own hand-fabricated supporting metalwork. The completed collection toured the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) headquarters in Carlsbad, California; the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in "Gem Artists of North America"; and the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Illinois.

The artist

Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary sculptor and creative director of L'Aquart, heir to a family atelier whose tradition reaches back to 1968. An engineer by training, he gave the bench what engineering could not match; his carved works are held in museum collections worldwide, and since 2010 he has collaborated with S.T. Dupont on Haute Création pieces. His practice insists on harmony between lapidary carving, metalwork and structural planning — and on refusing difficulty as a reason not to proceed.

Offered by

Surround Art & Diamonds — North American representative of L'Aquart — presents this work as a singular object at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft and collecting, with nearly a decade placing Quispe Aparicio's sculptures in private collections across the United States and Europe.

• Material: Fossilized whale bone; vermeil metalwork
• Dimensions: 15 × 15 × 21 cm (5.9 × 5.9 × 8.3 in)
• Year: 2017
• Artwork origin: Peru
• Edition: Unique, one of one
• Status: In hand, available