Old bones are sold by Jon Ferry for use in medical education. However, there is a dubious history of exploitation in the medical bone trade.
A brown box is perched on a wooden coffee table in a compact, well-lit Bushwick studio. There’s a human head within. Jon Pichaya Ferry pulls a box cutter from the pocket of his black skinny trousers and asks, “Wanna start?”
He peels the thin aqua foam covering off lumpy form inside to expose a skull’s mandible. The remainder of the skull emerges, and he joins the two pieces before setting it on the lid of a coffin in the corner of the room next to a can of Red Bull.
In light of the betel nut stain on the skull’s teeth, Ferry claims that it is most likely of Indian origin. Before it joins 80 skulls neatly arranged in a glass cabinet, it will shortly be examined, photographed, and entered into a database.
Each bears a baby blue label looped around its cheekbone bearing an accession number and the word “Jons Bones,” the brand name of Ferry’s business. Above the skulls, five articulated skeletons hang; across from them, more than a hundred spines are graded from dark to light, like a paint sampler. The various angles of sacrums serve as a reminder of the many positions that the individuals who once possessed these spines once adopted.
Ferry, 22, is a bone merchant. At the age of 13, he began to become obsessed. He was raised in Thailand. He received a mouse skeleton from his father, which, despite being “creepy, dark, and weird,” ignited his passion and eventually led him to start articulating animal skeletons. Ferry founded Jons Bones as an animal skeleton company after relocating to New York at age of 18 to attend Parsons to study product design.
