There is something immediate about encountering timber and stone. They carry weight, temperature and texture, as well as residue of where they have come from. Timber holds the direction of growth within its grain; stone contains the pressure and movement of geological time before either is shaped by the artist, each already carrying a history.

It is with this sensitivity to material, place and history that Anton Forde has developed a practice of remarkable scale and quiet intensity. His works have made significant inroads across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, yet Mārie marks his first official solo exhibition with a commercial gallery in Aotearoa.

Through meditation, dreaming, carving, cutting, shaping and reduction, he enters into a dialogue with what the material offers, allowing its resistance, irregularities and inherent qualities to guide the work. His process is physical, yet the resulting forms often possess a surprising delicacy—materials traditionally associated with weight and substance become light and almost ethereal, while hard become surfaces tender. The act of making is not simply one of imposing form, but of paying attention to what is already present and discovering what might be revealed.

As Michael Steedman has aptly observed of Forde, “The kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness.”  The phrase offers a way into Forde’s practice, grounded in a thoughtful observation of the world and the ways in which we inhabit it. Nothing attempts to announce itself. Meaning accumulates slowly, through the encounter between surface and light, weight and gesture, what has been removed and what remains. His works ask for a different kind of looking: beyond immediate recognition and, towards what might emerge through time.

This attentiveness extends beyond the material itself to Forde’s relationship with place. Whenua is not simply the ground upon which we live; it carries histories, relationships and memory. Its contours can be read through ridgelines, waterways and pathways, and through the traces left by movement across its surface. Carving can operate in a similar way. A mark follows a surface while simultaneously altering it, creating a record of contact between body and material.

In this sense, Forde’s whakairo shares a resonance with traditions of marking and inscription, where marking can carry relationships to whenua, whakapapa and identity. His work does not seek to reproduce these forms or traditions. Rather, it sits within a broader understanding of the mark as something capable of locating us: in relation to a place, a body, a history, those who came before us, and those who may follow.

The works also move between the earth and the sky. Timber and stone hold us close to the ground. They are tangible, resistant and earthly. Yet throughout Forde’s practice there is also a sense of looking beyond the immediate: towards the horizon, the night sky and the stars. To look upwards is one of humanity’s oldest gestures of orientation. Long before maps and instruments, people navigated by celestial bodies, reading the sky to understand where they were and where they might go. The stars offered both direction and possibility.