Meet the Maker Defying Logic with Massive Stone and Wood Structures
“Ethan Stebbins: Dichotomies” is on view through the end of July at Les Atelier Courbet
The window of Les Atelier Courbet in West Chelsea currently showcases a single item: a large stone boulder with functioning wooden drawers. Niche Drawers has been stopping passersby in their tracks ever since it was placed there to announce the opening of “Dichotomies,” a show featuring the work of Ethan Stebbins.
Stebbins’ pieces, sourced by the likes of Nicole Hollis and Julie Hillman, defy logic. Massive granite boulders are pierced by wood beams; benches seem to effortlessly pass through stone. It begs the question: how does Stebbins persuade such rigid forms to coexist in this way, to settle into one another as if it’s what nature always intended. The effect, one viewer noted at the opening, was “like two stubborn materials somehow agreed to meet each other halfway.”
Born and raised in coastal Maine, Stebbins originally aspired to a different creative life. The son of a public-school English teacher, he fell in love with poetry as a teenager, studying creative writing and English at Colorado College before earning a fellowship to attend New York University’s graduate poetry program. “I was trying to become the next poet laureate,” he says with a laugh.
After graduate school, Stebbins returned to Maine and found work in landscape stone construction, first with master gardener Masahiko “Masa’ Seko and later alongside esteemed craftsman Chris Tanguay.
What began as a practical way to make a living gradually morphed into something else as he began to look at stone as a medium with its own character and possibilities. Furniture came into the picture when an ex-girlfriend asked him to build her to build a simple bed. Stebbins instead crafted a platform bed that incorporated found boulders, with wood inlaid directly through the stone. The Wabi Sabi bed, finished in 2020, eventually found its way online, where it caught the attention of Les Atelier Courbet founder Melanie Courbet. Over time Stebbins left landscape and masonry work behind to devote himself entirely to furniture and sculpture.
Today, he works alone between two studios in Maine. Large boulders are sourced from gravel pits and quarries, where he spends weekends roaming among piles of stone in search of ones that might inspire a future piece. Logs come from local tree services and are often left to dry for years before they can become furniture. His process requires tractors, forklifts, diamond saws, grinders, and incredible patience.
Each piece is the result of countless adjustments and refinements. Stone is cut away incrementally. Wood is shaved down little by little. Components are repeatedly fitted, removed, and fitted again until they finally settle into place.
Stebbins works without assistants, computers, or robots. One recent piece, a charred maple table, took two years of carving, drying, waiting, and carving again before it was complete. “I feel I am doing something I haven’t seen before, and it feels like people respond to it on a deeper level, the way art moves people,” he says of his arduous process.
Stebbins—who jokes he is a “recovering poet”—often uses language more associated with prose to describe his process. Words seem very carefully chosen. “Follow the stone,” he recently wrote on Instagram. “The stone is your guide.” Reflecting on the aforementioned stone cabinet with precisely crafted drawers, he mused: “Drawers in a boulder. But what about drawers in a meadow? Or drawers in the Atlantic? I love the idea of little secret spaces hiding improbably in big beautiful spaces.” Other posts include quotations from writers Mary Ruefle, Diane Ackerman, and John Keats.
“Having studied poetry, I think there is a directly proportional relationship to the amount of difficulty and labor you put into something, and the amount of satisfaction you get out of it,” he says. “I am weirdly drawn to the most difficult thing I can imagine, because if I can figure it out and make it happen, the payoff is so much greater”
“Dichotomies” is on view through the end of July at Les Atelier Courbet, 134 Tenth Avenue, New York.