The Secret Life of Vegetables

Shawn Feeney transforms everything from parsnips to pumpkins to papayas into fascinating faces and strange characters.

Feeney knows faces. He studied forensic facial imaging with the FBI and worked for the Suffolk County Police Department in New York. Later, he joined Lucasfilm’s visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic, before turning to organic canvases. He calls the series of sculptures The Invisible Underground. For some pieces, Feeney works with a design, for others he simply starts carving and lets the vegetable decide which character will emerge. And each year, he commemorates the life of an artist as a jack-o-lantern: 2012’s was a pumpkin portrait of Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch. See that and more of his work in the slideshow below.