It is a sunny winter day in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Boaz Vaadia’s studio, a cavernous industrial space, is filled with light. It illuminates a menagerie of large, layered stone human figures, seemingly endowing them with life. The figures, some of which have also been cast in bronze, are anchored on glacier-formed boulders in varied states of repose, whether alone or in intimate groupings or accompanied by a stone cat or dog. On the workbench lies a collection of hammers and chisels, and along the perimeter an army of busts, also made of carved and stacked stone, keeps watch over this peaceful, primeval environment. The massive forklift and crane and packing crates, however, invoke a present age of more practical concerns.

The Israeli-born Vaadia, who has been working in New York for more than 30 years, stands solidly planted among his creations, beaming with satisfaction, as if he were about to introduce his family. “Throughout my career, I have been searching for the primal connection of man to earth, and I found it in stone,” says the 56-year-old artist. “Humans have had a relationship with stone since the beginning of our evolution. Stone is alive; it’s the bone structure of the earth. I work with stone as if I was another force of nature, like the wind or water, continuously reshaping and reforming it. And I try to release its power with the hope that viewers will be able to connect with it.”

Vaadia, whose work can be seen in museums and public spaces worldwide—for example, in the entrance to the residential tower at the Time Warner Center in New York—creates his sculptures in bolted and glued layers of slate and bluestone, materials used to build sidewalks, roofs and windowsills that he began salvaging from construction sites in Manhattan’s SoHo district, where he had his first studio. The materials themselves, which are associated with humanity’s need for shelter and community, convey meaning for Vaadia. Layering is also an important metaphor for him because of its relationship to both man and nature. “That is how some stone is formed, from layers of sedimentary deposits over millions of years,” he says. “The layers also represent a person’s growth over time, which happens in layers of understanding.”

They also symbolize Vaadia’s own artistic evolution. He began his career at age 14, having first studied at an art school in Tel Aviv and then later at Manhattan’s Pratt Institute and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, creating abstract sculptures in stone, wood and leather that were inspired by tribal art and his fascination with sacred artifacts. But it wasn’t until 1984, after several critically acclaimed New York gallery exhibitions of his abstract work, that he began to view stone differently. “I suddenly understood the layers in the stone and realized that I could create something entirely new using this concept,” says Vaadia, who traces his respect for nature and natural materials to having grown up on a farm in Israel. “I had tried to work with figures before, but it felt too derivative. Then, I saw that I could reinterpret the human figure in a way that hadn’t been done before. I surrendered to the stone.”