Anton Forde | Mārie

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 and internationally, yet Mārie marks his first official solo exhibition with a commercial gallery in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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.

This movement between earth and sky is notably apparent in Titirotiā ki ngā whetū — two carved stone works depicting faces gazing upwards towards the stars. Their highly polished surfaces catch and return the light, creating the impression that starlight is reflected back from the stone itself. The figure seems both to look outward and to receive something in return.

These works resonate with Māori understandings of the night sky as a source of knowledge and ancestral connection. The whetū (stars) form part of a wider celestial landscape through which we seek direction and find our place in the world. Here, stone, a material of the earth, is brought into dialogue with the stars above it.  The upward gaze of the faces become both contemplation and orientation; grounded in the material world, yet reaching towards something beyond it.

Forde’s work inhabits this space between the grounded and the celestial, between what can be touched and what can only be imagined.

It is here that Mārie begins to reveal itself. The title carries a quality of gentleness, but also of intention. To pay attention is not a passive act; it is to make a choice about what deserves to be noticed. In a world increasingly organised around speed, productivity and constant interruption, such attention can feel almost unfamiliar. Forde’s works invite a slowing down; a return to looking, listening and noticing.

The largest work in the exhibition, Ngā Toko, is a 9 metre sculptural relief composed of 52 shaped granite, obsidian and nephrite rods that undulate in scale across a single wall. Initially extracted and cored during the construction of larger stone works, these remnants have been meticulously restored and reshaped. They retain traces of deep geological time while simultaneously bearing the evidence of human intervention.

Here, extraction and transformation become central to the work. Forde does not treat material as passive or inert, but as something carrying its own physical and spiritual histories.

The notion of the core becomes equally significant: what lies at the centre, what is removed, and what remains. In Ngā Toko, absence is not simply a void but an active presence. The spaces created through extraction draw attention to what is missing as much as to what survives. The remnants of the stone hold the memory of what they once formed, while also becoming evidence of our enduring relationship with the earth: what we take from it, what we transform, and what we carry forward.

Across the exhibition, these relationships recur:

maker and material

body and whenua

earth and sky

absence and presence

memory and possibility.

Perhaps what Forde offers is less a collection of objects than an invitation to notice what is already before us, and to consider what might otherwise pass unseen.