Stone mason

From July 2026, I moved in Shikoku from Tokyo to work at 石屋TATA (TATA’s stone factory) and learn about stone carving skills. TATA is a well known artist in the region, who gets involved in many art events and balances his life between stone masonry and art making. His son, Shinsuke, aged 34 when I joined them, took over his dad’s company and therefore was my boss. Shinsuke and I quickly became friends, and I could learn from him, his hard work and his divine patience, a lot more than I was expecting, from fields much more varied than stone carving only. Shinsuke can do everything that involves stone, and it was not rare that in the same day we would work in the morning on a commission implying the reparation of an architectural element from Todai-ji (temple located in Nara) ; and spending the afternoon digging holes in a garden to install stone tiles for a terrasse. TATA-san gave me the opportunity to join a group exhibition for which I created a new work that you can go check out in the “volume” rubric. I’m grateful for what this family gave me, their trust and their support.

Here are some pictures, some of commissions works that I did and some just random.

That’s my latest commission work. A wall made out of stones assembled as a puzzle. Funny how it looks so fragile and thin like paper when really the stones were about 30 kg on average and I mostly had to carry them by hand. This job got me super jacked. I was happy cause Shinsuke trusted me on this job and I did it entirely alone.