After years working in a quarry, an artist finds his true path carved in stone.
Nestled on a quiet road in Waiʻanae Valley stands a 20-foot-tall structure outfitted with the stuff of a craftsman’s dream: forklifts, cranes, sanders, and grinders; stands equipped with metal clamps, swivels, and U-joints; worktables and red metal tool chests.
Amid the tools and machinery, unexpected items populate the scene: a trio of large boulders, a stone bowl with a white coral inlay, a sculpture artfully hand-carved in the shape of a mango— the artistic works of Don Matsumura, a Waiʻanae-born-and-raised stone sculptor with a deep connection to Hawaiian basalt, Hawaiʻi’s rock formed from volcanic lava flow.
Matsumura, who spent over 23 years quarrying rock for Hawaiian Cement, never imagined he would end up as a full-time artist. Applying to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the ’80s, Matsumura initially considered studying animal husbandry, since he worked at a dairy, and business, like his dad wanted. But once the campus’ art building caught his eye, he signed up for sculpture classes.
“Art was one of the first things I felt really comfortable with—that I couldn’t do anything wrong,” Matsumura says. “All I had to do was just make whatever I wanted to.”
Despite graduating with a fine arts degree, Matsumura settled into a reliable, nine-to-five job in the mining industry. At Hawaiian Cement’s large quarry in Halawa Valley, known for its rich basalt deposits, he drilled and blasted boulders that were then hammered into finer pieces for cement production. It was a good living, Matsumura concedes—his strong work ethic allowed him to rise through the company ranks to the role of general manager—yet he remembers often yearning for some other, yetunknown form of fulfillment. “I just knew that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be,” he recalls. “There was always something missing.”
In 2013, Matsumura retired to take care of his father, who had been diagnosed with dementia, and found moments to rekindle his creative side by making jewelry and carving small bowls of stone. Then, as he noticed that large, industrial equipment were becoming increasingly available to everyday craftsmen like himself, Matsumura toyed with the idea of sculpting largescale stoneworks. “All my life, I’ve been around big equipment with big tires, big buckets, and stuff like that,” he says. “That’s the environment that I like.” In 2022, he took a leap of faith. He built out a 40 x 100-foot shop space, adding the heavy equipment needed to achieve the projects he envisioned: a crane found on Craigslist that could transport boulders, a heavy-duty drill press capable of making holes 24 inches wide, a Kubota mini excavator.
Matsumura’s affinity for Hawaiian basalt is rooted in the stone’s aesthetic and endurance. “The stone stays around for a long time and eventually, over thousands of years, it breaks down from the wind,” he says. There is also the cultural connection through his Native Hawaiian heritage. In Hawaiian culture, stones, or pōhaku, are revered as sacred and utilized for various purposes, from everyday tasks like pounding kalo (taro) to masonry and crafting ki‘i (symbolic representations of deities). For Matsumura, Hawaiian basalt will always hold tremendous mana (power): “Looking back on my life, the images I kept and can still see so vividly are of stone–walking on dark, black boulders following a stream, the beach and mountains of Mākua Valley, huge rock walls dry laid without mortar.”
Today, stone sculpting remains an intentional, laborious affair for Matsumura—even a simple bowl can take months to complete—yet he never rushes the process, instead preferring to take his time observing the stone, walking around it, and touching it as he crafts it into a sculpture. Sometimes he will move a stone around or stand it up to gain a new perspective and, hopefully, some answers. “I’m talking to it, you know? ‘Where do you come from? What do you want to be?’” The environment matters too: “Everything has to be really quiet, peaceful,” he explains. From there, Matsumura simply listens for directions and allows the stones to guide him.
Most mornings, Matsumura heads to the shop—just a few steps from the house he shares with wife, Sandra—where he then moves between various projects to keep his creative energies flowing. Sometimes he plays with negative space, removing perfectly disc-shaped sections of rock from a raw, irregular boulder. Other times, he’ll pick up a Dremel to fine-tune a stone sculpture’s intricate details.
Matsumura shares that while his journey from working in a rock quarry to becoming a stone sculptor now makes sense to him, he initially struggled with insecurities related to choosing the artist path. He has since embraced the belief that he’s exactly where he is meant to be, making a point to reflect on any hang-ups the same way he contemplates the stone forms in front of him. “That process clears the way for me to look at the stone and be able to receive something that says, ‘OK, this is what you can do.’”