Sculptural remote control carved by Joe Sheehan from the series 'The Quick and the Dead'. New Zealand, 2014.

Sculptural remote control from the series 'The Quick and the Dead', carved in greywacke, basalt, and argillite.

Joe Sheehan is from a family of greenstone carvers who made jewellery and small objects largely for the tourist market in New Zealand. Most of these souvenir items start their life as greenstone exported from New Zealand to the noted gemstone town Idar-Oberstein in Germany, where it is carved into trinkets (such as mini tiki heads for example), before being sent back to New Zealand to sell to the tourist trade.

Greenstone is a form of jade and carving it is a traditional Maori craft. There is a strong sensibility towards this type of stone in New Zealand. The artist was drawn to it as a material to reinterpret how the stone has become so popularly used to make tacky tourist trinkets, but has a history as a highly valued stone with a deep spiritual significance in Maori culture. The artist wanted to invert the current trend for the stone’s devaluation, making conceptual pieces which he views very much as art objects. His pieces refer to the everyday, such as light bulbs, remote controls etc but are made purely of stone. He makes them as perfectly formed objects then smashes them.
Other New Zealand jewellers have made work in a similar vein, adapting traditional Maori motifs from the early 1960s, such as Alan Preston and Warwick Freeman.

The objects have a very tactile nature and link to the use of prehistoric stone tools. They are both basic and sophisticated at the same time. Remote controls can quickly become obsolete or easily replaced by new technology. Sheehan found a large lot of 700 remote controls on eBay, catalogued by make. At the same time as acquiring these, he visited many museums of archeology and ancient history. He began to link the two and treat the eBay purchase of defunct remote controls as an archeological find of sorts. The ergonomics of a remote are directly connected to the hand, in much the same way as the earliest stone tools. Each remote, like each tool, has a specific use. Remotes enable us to use something but also separate us from the machine being controlled.

The artist posits that defunct remotes are like objects from a lost civilisation. Detached from the machine it controls, it becomes mysterious and useless. Once he has carved the remote, he fractures it into smaller pieces to create further ambiguity. The form is still recognisable but it is broken in such a way that a real remote would never break. They are liminal objects due to this ambiguous status and in their use of materials.

By the end of 2015, Sheehan has made ca. 140 remotes in this series, seeing them as a group but also as individual, stand-alone objects. Each one is handmade and unique.

W.6-2015