Bone Art

The Bone Church

40,000 dead form morbidly fascinating sculptures and artwork; skeletons meticulously fashioned in 1870 by a wood carver. This is Sedlec’s Church; All Saints ossuary in the Czech Republic.

So why were so many corpses buried here, and who was responsible for the works of art? In 1278 the Cistercian abbot of Sedlec, Henry, traveled to Palestine and the ‘Holy Land’, bringing home a sample of earth from Golgotha which was later, upon his return, sprinkled over the grounds of his local cemetery. The grounds were immediately considered scared, and hence became a much sought after location for relatives to bury their dead. In the 14th century, the Black Death spread the bubonic plague across Europe and now 30,000 bodies all wanted a resting place within the sacred grounds. Such vast numbers of dead led to the creation of the ossuary in 1511 by a half-blind monk who gathered up the bones to be stacked up within the ossuary, making space for new corpses, which were soon taken up by more victims from 15th century Hussite Wars. The ossuary itself is situated in the basement of the All Saint’s Chapel.

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The Bone Tree

The bone tree, made of cattle bones. Built on the platform that held 1998's theme creature, the "Nebulous Entity." The bone tree did similar wanderings about the Playa, but wasn't as noisy.

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Bone art by Jeff Hammond

This is an interesting Sculpture made of bones.

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Bebo's Bonz

Bebo's Bonz specializes in custom bone art. Fine art pieces fashioned from one of nature's most beautiful mediums- sun bleached, sometimes fossilized animal bone. Using a unique spin on a time-honored tradition, Bebo brings bones back to life through extraordinary imagination!Every Bebo piece is one-of-a-kind. 100% unique and distinct! No two works are the same and a Bebo sculpture is sure to be the center piece of an existing art collection or a fantastic way to begin a new one! If you need a rare and innovative gift for that hard-to-buy-for person in your life or a tantalizing art collectible for yourself, Bebo's Bonz are the perfect choice.

All of the work's components are either hand-crafted from all natural materials or hand pieced with those materials. With meticulous precision, Bebo combines all the individual elements into a striking and compelling collectible!

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Artwork 6 - Inuit Whale-bone Sculpture

Among the peoples of the Earth, few have had a deeper or more profound knowledge of animals than the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. For centuries these semi-nomadic wanderers traversed the tundra in search of the game upon which they depended for food and clothing. If today's Inuit no longer rely on animals for their survival as their ancestors did, their knowledge of the region's wildlife remains strong, and contemporary Inuit sculpture abounds in images of seals, caribous and birds of all descriptions. The most common animal subject, however, is the polar bear, an animal traditionally regarded as a symbol of physical and spiritual power and only infrequently hunted for its meat. The unsigned example included here, carved in the 1970s from brownish-white organic whalebone by an artist from the northern half of Baffin Island, captures the animal's grace as well as its tremendous strength, and contains hints of an underlying spiritual meaning.

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