Death by stone

This piece draws from one of Europe’s oldest and most haunting folk traditions: the hunting of the wren on December 26th, St. Stephen’s Day. According to legend, it was the wren who betrayed Saint Stephen by its song, revealing his hiding place and leading to his death by stoning. In response, communities in Ireland and beyond would capture and kill wrens each year as ritual repayment, believing their sacrifice ensured luck, protection, and renewal for the year ahead. The bird became both scapegoat and offering.

At its core, the work inhabits that cycle of blame and consequence, a death born of a death, a punishment for a betrayal that may only ever have been a song.
The carving reflects this tension between reverence and violence. The wren’s form is intentionally disassembled and reassembled, its anatomy rearranged by intuition rather than realism, echoing the way myth reshapes nature to carry its stories. Set into the head is a fire agate, placed where the eye and beak flow naturally into the stone. The white vein within the gem echoes the pale line that marks a wren’s head, letting the material feel like part of its being rather than an addition.

Fire agate itself carries symbolism of protection, grounding, and inner flame — a stone historically associated with warding danger, rekindling vitality, and turning harm away from the bearer. In this context, it becomes both a relic of the bird’s fate and an inversion of it: a gemstone where once there was song, a symbol of luck rooted in a story of death.

What was once stilled by stones now bears stone as witness.
Death by Stone lives between folklore and embodiment, a memorial to a creature once hunted for the sins of its voice, and a reflection on how superstition and story outlive the bodies they claim.