As always our Arts on Tuesdays event includes a lovely morning tea (gluten free* home baked treats). For our next scheduled event we are delighted to announce that Dorothy and John Wakeling will join us and share about the conception and realising of their dream - a sculpture park in the Waikato. Their discovery of the old quarry through its development into the taonga it is today. Hear about some of the wonderful programs and exhibitions they have run over the years and more recently how the creation of the Art-In-Nature Arboretum Trust is destined to see the park into the future. If we have time we may also hear from an artist or two that have been fortunate to have work shown at the park in the past, how exhibiting alongside so many wonderful works and in such an inspirational setting was and is a privilege.

Our morning will also include Marcus Tatton addressing some of the marvellous work in his exhibition, the inspiration and some of the nuts and bolts (or lack of them) when he makes some of his astounding pieces - the largest of which is 3m plus!. He may even bring his chainsaw set up to show how he achieves the remarkable forms that emerge from massive cast-off logs that have become the sculptures in the show.

Tatton was a wild King Country lad when he first enrolled in Art School in Dunedin in the mid-1980s. After two years, he set his sights on a Fine Arts course in Tasmania, where he studied from 1987 to 1990. Now, four decades later, he returns to Aotearoa with a rich legacy of sculptural practice and deep connections to the whenua.

Recently the Artist in Residence at Waitakaruru Sculpture Park Marcus is crafting a body of work that explores rural kaitiakitanga across both Tasmanian and Aotearoa landscapes. His sculptures draw on the shared ancestry of tree species—Nothofagus, Phyllocladus, and Dacrydium—relatives of our native beech, manoao, tanekaha, and rimu. These forms echo ancient Gondwanan ties and speak to the enduring relationship between land and people.

The connections run deeper than timber. Tatton’s great-grandfather was a ship’s doctor and dentist who travelled to Tasmania before settling in Nelson in the 1850s. Generations later, Marcus’s father Hone Tatton purchased bushland in Ongarue—land that Marcus now stewards and carves upon. Let's hear from him about where to now with his work?

This exhibition is a celebration of those layered connections: across oceans, through whakapapa, and within the grain of the wood itself. Each sculpture invites us to reflect on the stories embedded in the land, the materials, and the hands that shape them.

Come and experience these powerful works—crafted with reverence, rooted in history, and resonant with meaning.

*While we take all care our gluten free foods, cannot be guaranteed suitable for celiac sufferers.