THE PROCESS OF CREATING POUNAMU ART

Stone is carefully selected especially for the design. When we are choosing material we look for stone that will fit the design in colour, strength and character. We also avoid imperfections such as fracture lines and inclusions in the stone.

While cutting pounamu, water is used to keep the stone from heating up and to keep the dust down. The average time it takes to cut a single slab of New Zealand Jade (Pounamu) is 6 hours.
Our greenstone/Jade is nephrite, which on the Mohs scale is recorded to be a 6.0 in hardness.

Due to its hardness we use diamond-impregnated tools to carve our pounamu as diamond is rated 10 on the Mohs scale making it one of the hardest minerals.