About Stone The Crows

As the Northern Hemisphere sleeps, we here at Stone the Crows in the beautiful city of Christchurch, New Zealand (also known as Middle Earth) are happily working, creating our unique pieces of functional art from the wonderful creamy white limestone quarried from Oamaru in the Otago hills.

Oamaru lies 3/4 of the way down the South Island of New Zealand on the Eastern or Pacific coast.

Oamaru stone is a limestone, that is the hard calciferous shells of marine animals built up into a thick blanket of limey sediment on the sea floor, which over 30 to 40 million years became lithified (hardened into rock) and was eventually lifted above sea level.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever” Keats.

All of our art works are entirely hand crafted. At Stone the Crows we take pride in the high quality finish of our book ends, CD ends, candle holders, clocks and sculptures, in fact all our handmade products.

Great gifts with an original Pacific flavour, the clean lines and simple shapes of our art lend themselves perfectly to contemporary and traditional homes.

But who are we really?

Every piece is hand crafted by Carol and Ciaran.

Carol, a Kiwi (born in New Zealand) and Ciaran a native of lovely Ireland (the capital of Europe!) We spent many years working and travelling in Europe, before deciding to return to New Zealand to focus on the thing we loved, sculpture.

We began carving Oamaru stone about five years ago, initially we worked under an awning in the garden which was both too cold in winter and too hot in summer so necessity saw us wave goodbye to the trusty old Triumph car that had been lodging in our shed, and our ‘studio’ (the shed) was born, we have since then both been working full time in ‘the shed’, all our work is made entirely by hand, we use no machinery at all, so it really is a labour of love.

The unique combination of our Pacific and Celtic heritages form the inspiration for our art, and in both cultures a great artist was as revered as a great warrior.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about our work, or like something you have seen on our site, but would like to change the size or add your own twist to it, we will try most things, and are happy to collaborate with you.

Cheers, Carol and Ciaran.

“sculpture and painting have an effect, to teach us manners and abolish hurry” Emerson