LYONS - Shey is a years-long labor of love.

She’s a 4-3/4 ton lion sculpture crafted by hand from Lyons Pink sandstone. What better place for her to settle than Bohn Park in Lyons?

Sculptor Kimmerjae Macarus found the original 8-ton sandstone block in a stoneyard where she worked during her time in landscape design. The block has been in her life for over a decade, ever since she discovered it before the 2013 Front Range floods.

She fell in love with the rock, looking at it and climbing it for years. The block had many significant vertical fissures, or “dry cracks,” and, combined with the enormous cost of purchasing the block, she felt it would be insane to try to bring the stone to her studio in Lafayette to carve it.

Her connection to the stone did not break, though. The Front Range floods moved many of the pieces in the stoneyard, and when she initially struggled to find this stone, she panicked and grieved for it.

When she finally found the stone again, she knew she had to try to carve something from it, even if the result wasn’t successful.

In 2018, she sold a sculpture titled “Boat of the Universe” to the City of Lafayette. With this boost in income helping her to pay for the stone, she had it brought to her property. The final sculpture was completed on September 26, 2024.

Macarus felt there was a sphynx-like structure to the block. She had obsessively drawn her vision of a hybrid creature as a prospective project for a zoo in Palo Alto, drawing it differently every time. Realizing one of her drawings fit the sense of the sandstone block perfectly, she used it as inspiration for Shey.

The final sculpture is still climbable, a concept that similarly inspired her in “Boat of the Universe.” Knowing how much kids enjoyed climbing into and sitting in the boat, she carved a spot in the lion sculpture specifically meant for settling into a place within the sculpture itself.

When Macarus finally completed Shey, she wanted to make sure Shey found a permanent home, recognizing much additional movement would likely put too much strain on the already significant dry cracks.

An acquaintance offered to buy it for his family, but Macarus felt that the sculpture should be in a public place so families could climb it. She and her friend looked together for the right place to move Shey before working with the town of Lyons.

On July 7, 2025, the Town of Lyons adopted and approved Resolution 2025-45, accepting the adoption of Shey. On August 14, she was moved to Bohm Park. Before the crane had even left the grounds, kids began climbing the sculpture.

Macarus says she was born a sculptor. As a child, feeling somewhat estranged from her surroundings, she enjoyed time by herself, creating artwork from the clay her grandmother dug from her back yard.

Some of her first pieces, clay models based on illustrations from The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling, came from these lumps of clay.

She sold clothes she made by the time she was 13.

She’s immersed herself in art for most of her life, especially studying it in high school.

When she discovered sculpture carving, she fell completely into it, begging Interlocken Academy to let her study sculpture as a freshman instead of having to wait until she was a senior.

After going to graduate school for landscape design, she started her own design company, which she ran for about a decade. When stone masons taught her how to use grinders, chisels, and other carving tools, she fell completely into carving sculptures from rock and never looked back.

She hopes that the sculptures she makes communicate with people in their own unique ways. As people have related to certain stones they find, she connects with the art she creates.

She distanced herself from gallery work because she’s always felt spiritual connections with her work. She wants to make work that is meaningful to her instead of making multiple pieces that feel almost exactly the same to her.

She encourages people to find their own interpretations for the art she makes, and she hopes that her sculptures, especially Shey, allow others to relate to the beauty of the rocks that surround them here in the Colorado mountains.

To see and learn more about Macarus’s work, be sure to head to bluestemstudioarts.com.