This description makes Zac Langdon-Pole’s practice sound playful, based in small acts of curious deployment of things, ideas, and words—the tangible and intangible, perceptible and imagined. And there is an element of play as it might be understood as testing the parameters and potential of the world—its material forms and organising principles. But Langdon-Pole’s work is far from whimsical. It is steeped in an array of knowledge systems, picking away at their complexities but also their ambiguities and absurdities when brushed up against each other. There is a little of everything—the science of materials (metals, polymers, ceramics, composites) and the natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, earth science, biology), philosophy, literature, art, history, zoology, botany, anthropology, photography—deployed with erudition but through the idiosyncratic processes of art.
After leaving his hometown of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2014 to undertake postgraduate studies at the prestigious Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Langdon-Pole later that year at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi and further subsequent exhibitions at Michael Lett, 2022, as well as at Station Melbourne, 2021 with Daniel Boyd, and Station Sydney, 2023, whilst also continuing to exhibit in international group exhibitions. Langdon-Pole held a McCahon House Residency in 2022 and in 2024 is presenting large-scale object works at Waiheke Sculpture on the Gulf and in Asia Pacific Triennial 11 at QAGOMA [Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art].
