The artist who carves the shape of light

Joe Lima remembers the exact moment his artistic practice clicked into place: He was working on a drawing exercise, sketching the linear quality of a dome, when he spotted a small woodblock print of a balloon in an art book.

"That's when it hit me," he says, standing in his Saint Henri studio surrounded by massive carved wooden blocks the size of grand paintings. "I said to myself, it's so interesting how clear this is. How precise this is."

That was the beginning of something entirely new in contemporary art—large-scale woodblock carvings that blur the line between sculpture and printmaking, between the familiar and the unsettling. Lima's pieces, some standing over six feet tall, transform everyday spaces into something altogether more mysterious.