CRAFT STORY | AMERICAS | PERU | STONE

A New Language for Peruvian Stone

From a chance meeting in the Amazonian jungle between Jenny Boucher, a Canadian textile designer, and Mauricio Navarro, a Peruvian industrial designer, DAR Proyectos was born. Working alongside local artisans, they transform gemstones into objects that invite interaction and play. Their work is a rare alchemy between ancestral craft, contemporary industrial design, and a philosophy of connection. 

More than 2000m above sea level and three and a half hours from their home in Pacasmayo, Jenny and Mauricio drive up the northern Andes following the Jequetepeque river. When they reach San Pablo, they are joined by their friend and stone carver, Coche Palomino, who accompanies them the rest of the way.

Along a muddy road that cuts through an otherwise lush, verdant landscape, they reach a narrow path and leave their car to continue on foot. After a 20-minute walk on an undulating trail, through rows of corn, they reach the mine where they greet a group of young men exiting with large rocks that they will load onto horses to take back down the mountain. The rock’s rough exterior conceals what Jenny and Mauricio made the trip to find: exquisite gemstones, formed in a cauldron of magma, water, air and stirred by endless tectonic shifts, then baked deep underground for millennia.

In 2015, Jenny Boucher, a Canadian textile designer, and Mauricio Navarro, a Peruvian industrial designer, met through an intergovernmental craft project that would bring together craftspeople from across the country. “Different communities and regions of Peru were represented by this beautiful project,” Jenny explains. “It was big for Peru. It was something that would integrate the regions of Peru, and all of those cultures are completely different from each other.”

Though Jenny did not speak Spanish then, her expertise in weaving and sewing became her way to connect with the groups of women weavers they met. Sharing her design and technical expertise “was the most practical and easy way to connect with anyone. I never felt like an outsider,” she explains. “I felt very humbled by their techniques and skills.” The team worked across various crafts including a unique craft transfer project where a traditionally male weaving craft was taught to a group of women backstrap weavers. Mauricio explained many of the men had left the craft for better-paying work. They found one older man who agreed to teach. “He was pleased that someone was interested,” they recalled. These early experiences informed Jenny and Mauricio’s approach when DAR Proyectos was founded.

Mauricio’s work with the stone carvers began in 2014 as part of another government-supported project. The design and craft intervention aimed to develop new products that could grow the tourism business, preserve the stone carving tradition, and reverse the decline in people entering the stone carving craft. Historically, stone carving in this region has foundations in beaded jewelry: chakira beads combined with spondylus shell and made into necklaces and other pieces in pre-Columbian Peru.

In recent decades, the local artisans replicated the beaded necklaces to sell as souvenirs to tourists. Animal figurines soon followed. But with rising customer demand from the international market the quantities ballooned to the thousands, causing price competition between the stone carving workshops, and eventually making the business unsustainable.

By 2016, Mauricio had introduced more geometric forms. Together with Jenny, who had since moved to Peru permanently, they developed a strong connection with the stone carving artisans, and a deep appreciation of the diverse character of the material, and the duality of stone carving itself. “The stone had this component in which you can model,” Mauricio explains. “You have to take away.”

The artisans’ day, like the landscape, is shaped by the seasonal and cyclical nature of the agricultural region where they live, and workdays begin at dawn. Shrouded in the scent of earth and water, the rustic workshop is a theater of whirring steel, rushing water, and swishing sandpaper all performing in unison in the art of removing to create. The small cube puzzle, simple in shape and difficult in precision, is reserved for the most experienced artisans. The cutting process alone takes two days.

Today, DAR Proyectos’ work is best expressed in the stone laundry clip and the cube puzzle. The stone laundry clip is, as Mauricio describes it, an expression of contrasts, “extraordinary stone material shaped into an ordinary, everyday object.” The cube puzzle is a different engagement, inviting the hands and mind to play together. These contemporary, functional, and playful pieces emerged from years of close collaboration with the artisans and a careful understanding of materials and construction methods.

What connects DAR’s work to ancestral lapidary traditions is the relationship with the stones themselves. The stones used in DAR Proyectos’ work come from across the country: esteatite soapstone, found in Cajamarca, orange jasper from the Huánuco region, pink rhodonite from Ancash, blue angelite found in the Andes of Arequipa, green serpentine sourced from the Huancayo region of Junin, blue dumortierite found in Lachaqui in the Canta Lima Andes, and two varieties of onyx from Canta Lima.

Each is said to carry metaphysical properties: soapstone for change, serpentine for physical healing and mental shielding, onyx for grounding. At their oceanfront home, Jenny and Mauricio share that they love leaving a stone puzzle out on the table when guests come over.

“Without us saying anything, they're drawn into it,” Jenny says. Sitting on the table, the cube made of colorful gemstones, cut into varying sizes and perfectly assembled, is waiting to be picked up. Then comes the inevitable question: “Can I touch it?”

Words by Kristen Sullivan Caron Cajamarca

Images from DAR Proyectos