What the Surface Holds continues a shift already underway at Formforge — away from work that begins with a brief or a site, and toward work that begins with an idea. Three pieces — Out of Water, a breaching whale; Relic of Memory, a remembered elephant; The Quiet Becoming, a human head mid-transformation — carry that instinct into large-scale steel sculpture. None of them depict their subject literally. Each reduces it to gesture, proportion, and the bare minimum of detail required to be recognised, leaving enough open space for a viewer to complete the rest on their own.
The title comes from how each piece is made to live, not just how it's made. A surface, here, is never finished the day it leaves the workshop, it keeps recording. Weathering steel continues to change long after fabrication ends, developing its own patina season by season, so the work goes on accumulating weight and color the studio can't fully predict or control. Mirror-polished stainless steel does the opposite, it holds nothing of its own, only what's put in front of it: the sky, the site, the people standing there. Between the two, the work is always in the process of holding something, time, reflection, memory, and the surface is where that holding becomes visible.
What ties the three pieces together, beyond material, is temperament. Each is large enough to dominate a site, yet none performs that scale loudly. The whale stays suspended mid-motion rather than mid-splash. The elephant is rendered not as a body but as a memory of one, broad planes, sweeping arcs, tusks bent into spatial gesture rather than ornament. The face holds its eyes closed at the exact moment before change becomes visible, caught in the pause rather than the event. Across all three, the studio is testing the same question: how much can a form give up, detail, literalism, motion, and still carry weight on its surface.
None of this happens at a desk alone. Every form begins as a digital model before the steel is CNC and laser cut, then welded, ground, and finished entirely by hand, a process that depends as much on the instincts of Formforge's fabricators as on the original drawing. Welds and joints are left visible rather than smoothed away; they sit on the surface as part of the work's character, not something to disguise. Bringing a weathered surface and a mirror finish together cleanly, given how differently the two materials behave under tooling, remains one of the more demanding parts of the process, one that rests on decades of hands-on experience in metal, carried by the craftsmen who shape it.
What the Surface Holds doesn't ask to be understood from one angle, or in a single visit. The work is built to be walked around, returned to, and seen differently as the light and weather around it shift, each visit registering on the same surface that's still registering everything else. That's deliberate. Each piece is designed to stay slightly unfinished in the eye of whoever's looking, so that the viewer, not the artist, completes the story. It is a continuation of Formforge's practice rather than a break from it, work made first for the idea, and only afterward for the site it happens to land on.
Out of Water
(Conceptualised in collaboration with Kiasma landscape)
Inspired by the fleeting moment a whale breaches the surface, this work explores the balance between monumentality and restraint. Constructed from hundreds of precisely layered steel sections, the sculpture reduces a familiar form to rhythm, contour and light. Seen from a distance, it reads as a single gesture. Up close, the individual layers reveal a process of construction that becomes part of the visual language. Set within water, the sculpture remains in constant dialogue with its surroundings—its reflection, shifting daylight and changing weather making the work feel quietly alive.
Rather than depicting a whale, the piece is an attempt to capture the emotion encountering one: unexpected, silent and profoundly humbling.
Relic of Memory
Inspired by the quiet authority of the elephant, Relic of Memory is not a literal portrait, but an attempt to hold on to what the animal represents: memory, age, intelligence and inherited Strength.
The form is reduced into broad planes and sweeping arcs, allowing the elephant’s presence to emerge through suggestion rather than detail. Weathered steel gives the work a sense of earth, weight and time, while the polished stainless-steel elements catch the surroundings and keep the sculpture visually alive. The contrast between the two materials creates a tension between what endures and what keeps changing.
The tusks are treated not as ornament, but as spatial gestures. They curve, frame and reflect, turning the sculpture into something between animal, artifact and architectural object.
Relic of Memory imagines the elephant as a remembered form — something ancient powerful and silent, carried forward into a contemporary language of metal, light and space.
The Quiet Becoming
The Quiet Becoming explores transformation not as a dramatic event, but as something internal, silent and gradual. The sculpture presents the human head as a still inner landscape, where thought, memory and emotion gather beneath the surface before taking Form.
The faceted corten-steel face gives the work an architectural weight, while the butterflies introduce movement, delicacy and release. Their presence suggests emergence — as if the The mind is slowly unfolding into the world.
The closed eyes are central to the work. They create a sense of withdrawal and introspection, holding the sculpture in a moment before change becomes visible. The result is a piece that feels both monumental and fragile, grounded and in motion.
