Collection: John Allen

John Allen has been working with wood for more than fifty years, from boyhood, sculpting pieces from New Zealand native timbers. Having followed a career path in the corporate world, around the year 2000, feeling a deep unease and inner knowing to be more in tune with changes happening in the world, John threw himself into his inner journey. This revealed new priorities and helped seed the opening into his sculpture practice in the last two decades.

John works with roots from fallen pohutukawa trees — iconic to New Zealand’s coasts, they grow in dramatic defiance of gravity and exposure. To ground, roots force around and through rocks – in a seeming harsh struggle for survival – but whose contortions, when you see them free and clear, manifest in effortless grace.

In the studio, John doesn’t seek to impose ideas or correct these forms, but to listen to them – to respond to the gestures the roots already carry, to the life force present. Life force unites the visible and invisible, the personal and the universal. It is both what gives form and what moves through it — the deep pulse of what we see of the world. Sculpting becomes a form of attunement – removing noise – to uncover what is present but not yet fully seen. Accessing aliveness. When a sculpture carries life force well, it creates a subtle but powerful exchange: a sense of connection, expansion, and presence in the one who encounters it. A sense of at-one-ness: form and flow as one, simplicity and inner calm, not-separate.

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