Iconicities

Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne, 2026

Iconicities explores the idea that writing is both a material object and a vessel of signification. Inspired by the traditions of concrete and visual poetry, the exhibition presents a series of embossed letterpress prints, an animation, and a bronze sculpture that treat language not simply as a transparent vehicle for meaning but as a visual, spatial, and physical form. The works explore a form of iconicity in which the intention to signify is written into the process of material production, or the process of production is written into the text itself. The letterpress prints use indexical words such as this, that, and it, folding reference back onto their own conditions of production. Because the poems are embossed rather than inked, they exist as literal deformations of the paper itself. The animation, Pattern Poem, explores the permutations of a matrix generated from the English palindromes ‘reifier’ and ‘deified’ through projected light, while the bronze sculpture, Alphabet Rod, reimagines the Latin alphabet as a continuous three-dimensional form in which each letter morphs into the next, articulating, for the first time, the space between letters.

‘Alphabet Rod’, Bronze, 3 x 3 x 100 cm
‘Iconicity 1-9’, Letterpress Embossing, Cotton Rag, 36 x 42 cm
‘Pattern Poem’, animation, 13:10 duration

Documentation: Simon Strong

Special thanks to Kahli and Aaron Perkins at Fullstop Framing for framing ‘Iconicity 1-9’