At just thirteen, Jay Simeon began apprenticing with his aunt, Sharon Hitchcock, in the design and carving of jewellery. The meticulousness of that early training is evident in his later work in stone and wood, where even the smallest details are rendered with exceptional precision.

The subject here appears to draw upon the Bear Mother story, in which a woman who disrespects the bears while berry picking is taken as the wife of a male bear and has two half human, half bear children, before the story ends in tragedy. Simeon distills this complex story into an extraordinarily intricate composition. The woman appears at the top, her face and hair rendered with painstaking delicacy, while below her the bear husband carries the two children, their small half human, half bear forms emerging from his ears.

In this work, the abundance of finely carved detail is matched by the sheer audacity of the carving itself. Most astonishing is the openwork. The extended tongue may recall the familiar imagery of the Raven rattle and of Haida panel pipes, where frogs extend their tongues to touch a reclining human figure. Here, however, Simeon takes the idea to an extraordinary extreme, carving the tongue almost entirely free of the surrounding stone. At its thickest point, this delicate appendage measures only three millimetres.

To hollow argillite to such an extreme degree requires extraordinary knife work and an almost preternatural command of the material. Every cut had to be measured against the possibility of a hidden fault. The result borders on the miraculous. What appears at first to be a solid, weighty sculpture contains passages of such delicacy that they seem scarcely possible in stone.

ND

I extend my thanks to Christopher W. Smith for his invaluable assistance in cataloguing this lot.