Left: Rory Mahon and Ayami Aoyama with Mahon’s “Nature Bell.” Dedicated to the couple’s five-acre nature and sculpture refuge, it incorporates acorns, pine cones, maple leaves, sunflowers, and wasp cases cast from found elements.
Rory Mahon and Ayami Aoyama forged their bond at the Johnson Atelier more than a quarter century ago. They continue to build their own sculpture garden in Hopewell.
By Ilene Dube | Photography by Andrew Wilkinson
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Johnson Atelier was the place to be for young artists working in metal and stone. Located first in West Windsor, and later in Hamilton, it was a hub where artists, fabricators, and innovators came together to bring ideas to life. The Atelier soon attracted makers from all over the world to nourish their practices through collaboration, dialogue, and discovery.
Atelier founder J. Seward Johnson Jr., sculptor and scion to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, relied on staff to fabricate his own work. In turn they benefited from the Atelier’s apprenticeship program, which offered artists the opportunity to hone skills while working with such celebrated artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, George Segal, Marisol, Red Grooms, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Kiki Smith, Toshiko Takaezu, and Isaac Witkin, among others.
Works created at the Atelier went on to be exhibited at such New York institutions as Madison Square Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Biennial. Johnson passed away in 2020 at age 89.
In 2025, the revenue-generating Atelier merged with the not-for-profit Grounds For Sculpture. The 42-acre sculpture park, arboretum, and museum was also founded by Johnson, on adjacent land in Hamilton, to showcase the work of Atelier clients. Of the more than 300 sculptures in the park, 40 percent were fabricated at the Atelier.
Many of the original Atelier artists settled in the region. In winter 2024, the Hopewell Valley Arts Council organized a reunion exhibition at the Pennington School, and this coming winter, the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie will host an exhibition of the group. It is being curated by artist Rory Mahon, who met his wife, stone carver Ayami Aoyama, through the Atelier.
The couple has their own sculpture garden on five acres in the Harbourton section of Hopewell. It is a labyrinth of nature and art that can be visited during the Hopewell Tour Des Arts September 26 and 27, or by appointment.
The Zen garden includes a fountain and lanterns that light up at night.
The property includes a Zen Garden, an arboretum, a foundry, studios, and an indoor gallery. In addition to their own sculpture, there are works on loan by fellow Atelier alum. A beehive hut, based on the clochán built by monks in southwestern Ireland, is under construction, made from Pennsylvania fieldstone. The door will have hand-forged hinges, and the three windows were cast by Mahon at Wheaton Village. “It’s the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken,” Mahon says, although it could be argued that the entire grounds is his biggest project.
Mahon acquired the property in 1986, before he’d met Aoyama. After using vacation time to look at many places, he knew this was it. The previous owner had raised gladiolas, so the building that was to become his studio was insulated and heated. Over the years, Mahon has adapted the many outbuildings — chicken storage, stables, a shooting range — to meet their needs.
The couple’s children — Finn, 22, and Kaito, 18 — were raised here. Finn has moved to Japan to explore his heritage, and Kaito, who just graduated from Hopewell Valley Central High School, will be in the honors program at Rutgers University.
Mahon creates sculpture from whatever he finds, including these benches from fallen trees.
Mahon, who has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Grounds For Sculpture, Artworks Trenton, and Princeton Adult School, and conducted workshops at International Sculpture conferences, ran the Sand Foundry at the Atelier. After he left the Atelier, he worked as a preparator for the Princeton University Art Museum for 10 years before the building closed in 2020 to make way for the new David Adjaye-designed space.
On a recent spring day, Aoyama, who works as finishing supervisor at Antiquity Stone in Morrisville, Pa., where artist Jeff Koons’ work is fabricated, was covered with dust. She was busy polishing Source of Life, a monolithic work in white marble somewhat suggestive of a female figure that was exhibited at Grounds For Sculpture 10 years ago. It was acquired by a private collector, and the 1,700-pound piece was about to be moved by Harry Gordon, the Lambertville-based sculptor who has moved large works of art for major art museums.
A few months later, on a hot summer day, Aoyama recounted the challenges of getting Source of Life through the door and into a large atrium. Lolly columns had to be installed in the basement to support the floor and counterweights were set up.
To create Source of Life, Aoyama, who grew up in Aichi, Japan, says she listens to the stone and lets it tell her what it wants it to be, accentuating the contrast between smooth and rough surfaces.
“I was a strange child,” she says. “When I was 3 my mom wanted me to play with toys, but I refused. She gave me a sketchbook and pencil, and those were the only things I played with.”
But Aoyama was never satisfied with her drawings, crossing out her figural renderings.
Her mother, whose own creativity was expressed through fabric and clothes-making, saw to it that Aoyama got lessons, and by middle school she was drawing magazine covers and winning contests and prizes. In the hours after high school let out, she took a train to Nagoya for special art training. Again, her mother supported Aoyama by helping her go to art college at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Art and Music.
“Japanese art college is really hard to get in to,” Aoyama admits. There are rounds of tests in painting and drawing that take several days.
After her studies, while showing her work in galleries in Japan, Aoyama saw friends going to Europe and thought the U.S., particularly New York City, might be more open to the work she wanted to make. She had received promotional materials from the Art Students League and when she applied, they helped her get a student visa.
“Speaking English was not required,” she says, and she arrived in the city in 1996 as a 27-year-old, finding an apartment from the school bulletin board.
Aoyama in front of her Madonna sculpture.
While her focus had been painting until then, Aoyama, who was always interested in sculpture, wanted to try something new. Unable to speak English, “I just carved stone the whole time. I was talking to the materials.” Mahon says she was speaking the language of stone.
“The Japanese stereotype is to be small, tiny, and weak, but I wanted to use my body, so I was attracted to the physical aspects of stone carving,” says Aoyama, who speaks English fluently now. Mahon points to a photo of her flexing her muscles while carving.
She credits her teacher, Lorrie Goulet, with teaching her to hear the sound the stone makes — “find your path in the angle, the shaving. The process goes from cleaning the surface, sanding, polishing, until you discover the line in the stone. Chiseling is like a brush stroke. You chisel off, and life is born.”
Another influence was Isamu Noguchi, the 20th century American sculptor who had studios in both New York and Japan. (Noguchi, whose father was Japanese, lived in Japan as a child.) Noguchi also engaged in a dialogue with stone. In 2013, Aoyama served as a resident at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, N.Y.
Mahon, too, cites Noguchi as an influence; one of his carved brick sculptures is titled Constantin (referring to 20th century pioneering modernist Brancusi), Isamu, and Me, and a fountain in the Zen Garden was inspired by Noguchi.
During her time at the Art Students League, Aoyama met sculptor Jonathan Shahn, who taught there. He was friendly and would come to visit her while she was working. It was Shahn, who lived in Roosevelt, who tipped her off about the Johnson Atelier.
She showed her portfolio to Christoph Spath, head of the newly opening Stone Division, and, still not speaking English, secured her way in. After her apprenticeship she went on to be an instructor in the Stone Division, and senior staff sculptor, repurposing parts of stone cut off from clients’ work.
The Princeton University geology department has used Aoyama to polish and reassemble stone from excavations so they can study the layers of sediment. “The stone carries so much history. I’ve felt it, but this reinforces it,” she says.
In addition to her stonework, Aoyama has recently returned to painting, creating intricate cityscapes.
These days, Aoyama has returned to painting, working out of a small building on the property. “I’m still seeing the same thing, accumulations and characters, grain to grain, built up like cities, owning the landscape,” she says.
She works from reference material from National Geographic, creating incredibly detailed villages. There is a peninsula surrounded by rice fields, with brightly painted houses and roofs, on which she has been working for two years. “I have made so many discoveries. You learn how the city was built,” Aoyama says.
On her website, Aoyama writes how she’s always had the urge to travel, but when she found stone carving, she no longer needed to travel — the journey is in seeking shapes, colors, and texture. “Stone contains life within … I always feel peace and happiness,” she notes.
In addition to the couple’s sculpture garden, Mahon recently completed an indoor gallery where much of their work can be viewed on the Hopewell Tour des Arts and by appointment.
Mahon, who grew up in Astoria, Queens, N.Y., went to Cooper Union to study architecture, but once there he found his calling as an artist. At the end of his senior year, his professor, Reuben Kadish, a sculptor, told him about the newly formed Johnson Atelier.
“I took NJTransit to Princeton Junction (when the Atelier was located on Alexander Road), walked, and had an interview,” Mahon says.
“Gravity,” Mahon’s first piece completed at the Johnson Atelier.
The stipend for an apprenticeship was barely sustainable — Mahon recalls making “$1.17 an hour (by the time Aoyama came along, in 1998, the stipend had gone up to $4 an hour) and he lived with roommates including Francois “Le Corbeau” Guillemin, another Atelier artist who runs Firedance Studio in Hopewell.
“A lot of us had side jobs after working long hours and weekends,” says Mahon, “but the ultimate perk is that we were allowed access to make our own work. I praise Seward Johnson for that more than anything. It was 24/7, we would literally sleep there.”
Soon Mahon and a colleague started the Sand Casting Department. “When you got good at something,” he recounts, “there was the expectation that you would teach younger apprentices.”
Because they were together all the time, the Atelier artists developed deep and lasting relationships. Some fell in love and married, such as Aoyama and Mahon. Many of the original artists settled in the region and became best friends.
“We go to each other’s funerals,” says Mahon. “People show up we haven’t seen in a long time. Even though decades have passed, we’re still connected. Because we loved the place, we wound up loving one another. Even if we fought over things, we shared so much, working shoulder to shoulder. There are some (who have deceased) that I feel bad I never got to hug one last time.”
The Johnson Atelier was a place to learn and to teach. “Seward’s manifesto — which we hung in the Sand Department — enabled us to come up with techniques and innovations while working at night on our own,” says Mahon.
Department heads and staff were encouraged to teach night classes to anyone from another department who wanted to learn.
A coworker suggested to Aoyama that she take the class in sand casting “with the nicest man.” Aoyama says she felt shy, but she had stone pieces that needed to be made into metal so took the workshop. Her only prior encounter with Mahon had been when he came to an exhibition of hers at the Extension Gallery wearing his foundry uniform, his face covered with graphite.
“I had to go back to work afterward,” he explains. He went up to congratulate her. Later, Aoyama told a friend, “the dirtiest man came up to me.”
But in his casting class, when she saw how hard the work was and how good he was at doing it, she became smitten. A work Aoyama created in the sand casting class can be seen along the sculpture trail, as if to honor that moment that brought them together.
Mahon stokes the fire in his foundry.
Mahon worked with such artists as Isaac Witkin and Georgia O’Keeffe. “I cast her one monumental sculpture,” he says of O’Keeffe. “We were the best, no foundry in America could do what we could do.”
Mahon says the Atelier was his whole life, “It gave me a sense of purpose as an artist. It was where I developed confidence that I was on the right path and it helped me become an artist.”
To this day, Aoyama and Mahon help each other when they need each other’s skills. For example, Aoyama may seek his help for metal bases, and she may do a stone feature for his work. Several years ago, when he was carving brick, an accident resulted in his breaking a wrist. Aoyama took over the carving.
In the early 2000s, Mahon was part of the Abominog group, a cadre of sculptors who poured hot iron for public entertainment.
“We could be flamboyant and crazy, and we didn’t let the public down. Pouring iron is very visual and spectacular,” he says. Abominog’s pours were held at Art All Night and the Old Barracks, both in Trenton.
After leaving his job at the Princeton University Art Museum, Mahon has continued casting for American artist Julian Schnabel, but realized the need to establish the gallery to best present the couples’ work to their many collectors. It is open by appointment (609.477.4424).
The grounds, too, can be seen by appointment. “I’m a city boy, but I’ve done a lot of tree planting,” he says in a grove of oak trees he started from seedlings found on the property. There are benches made from the trees, and he has infinite plans for more. Bronze acorns, paper wasp nets, mushrooms, and even little “gifts” from the cat have been cast.
Taking a visitor on a stroll through the sculpture trail — there are visual surprises at every twist and turn, such as a found bronze or a gift from a fellow conference attendee — Mahon discusses his dream of developing the property, of which he’s devoted 40 years of his life, into a sculpture park for Hopewell Township.
“We are both thriving artists, not slowing down, always adding new work,” he is quick to point out. “I’m always thinking of future projects and all the technical details to make them happen.”
He pulls a few invasive vines as he walks, saying, “These things that we’ve made will be around for a thousand years, spanning generations.”
