As a student, Shigeo Toya was deeply affected by the experiments of the Mono-ha (‘School of Things’) movement, which transformed possibilities for Japanese art in the early 1970s. In their performances and installations, the Mono-ha artists drew on critiques of the ego to shift the emphasis of artmaking away from creating new objects, and towards presenting physical things in their raw, unadorned immediacy. Toya expanded on these positions from the perspective of his experience as a sculptor; he sought to realise Mono-ha’s focus on materiality and encounter by restoring a degree of artistic labour.

Woods III epitomises the stylistic balance of orderly arrangement and ornate carving that Toya would later term ‘minimal baroque’. The work foregrounds the material qualities of wood, recalling the experience of walking in nature, but also references the ruins of Pompeii and what is left of a civilisation in the wake of disaster. Toya underscores this reading by rubbing pale ash into the lumber, suffusing its sobriety with a ghostly aspect.