On Ancestral Knowing

Relationships to whenua and moana precede individual authorship. Knowledge is not newly invented within each generation; it is carried, adapted, and rearticulated through lived engagement with land and sea.

Ancestral wisdom is often described as inherited understanding. In practice, it manifests less as abstraction and more as orientation — how one stands within place, how material is gathered, how restraint is exercised. These frameworks are not decorative references but underlying conditions that shape decision-making.

Connection to whenua and moana is not symbolic within the work. The stone itself originates in tectonic movement, sedimentation, erosion, and marine contact. To work with it is to engage with those histories directly. The process becomes less about imposing form and more about recognising continuity between human intention and geological presence.

What may be called “innate knowing” is often the result of sustained exposure — time spent observing tides, weather, terrain, and material behaviour. It is knowledge formed through repetition and attention rather than mythology.