ABOUT JOHN
John Allen has been sculpting for more than fifty years, crafting pieces from fallen and found New Zealand native timbers. Having followed a path in the corporate world to mid career, in the 1990s, feeling a deep restlessness and time for change, John started diving into philosophy and the practice of art. This seeded the opening into his sculpture practice in the last two decades, and slowly revealed a new way of being in the world. John now lives his life-long passions; sculpting, inner exploration, surfing and family.
John Allen sculpture is held in private collections spanning New Zealand, Australia, USA and Europe.
Sculpture is available by commission.
For John wood sculpting is a journey of discovery; sensing layers no longer serving, focus on coherent curves and revealing the core, smoothing, and sensing wholeness, inner peace and finally, luminosity. It is a progressive reveal.
His sculpture is an expression of this ever-present inner healing and actualization process. Courage to open inwards, to be vulnerable, in order to know oneself as sovereign and already-whole. And holding and allowing, opening outwards to know connection with all and the relational field of being. The union of separation and unity.
John’s sculpting process has been inspired by architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander, who pioneered an approach to creating life and wholeness in art and architecture. Using Alexander’s fifteen design attributes John’s process is a meditative enquiry in which the attributes are focal points for the amount of life and wholeness present.
Studying art history at university, John is strongly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder. Current significant influences in terms of practical philosophy are Zach H. Evans, Iain McGilchrist and Charles Eisenstein.
Japanese design aesthetics are present for John when he is sculpting - in particular wabi-sabi, as much of the wood John uses has natural imperfection and the effects of ageing; and yugen, a sense of profound grace, a crucial element in the feeling of wholeness.
John is of Celtic, English and Samoan decent.
POHUTUKAWA
Spending much time near the ocean, coastal pohutukawa trees organically became John's chosen medium. They are magnificent beings growing in seemingly inhospitable cliff-side zones.
There are many fallen pohutukawa trees around the coasts of New Zealand now. John is drawn to the roots of fallen trees ready to take on their next life phase with their wild and graceful curves, and is attuned to their Celtic knot-like forms. For him they symbolise courage and attention for journeying, and our human-native connection in wholeness to all that is around us.
