Mark Gowing’s exhibition This one is a song, held at Damien Minton Presents in Surry Hills, Sydney from 15 — 26 July 2025, explores the confluence of language and art, human mortality and futility, and the physicality of books. Gowing’s new body of work draws on a lifetime spent in publishing, type, and print media, and utilises found book covers and pages in place of the canvas as a key element in his practice. Here, I talk with Gowing about his creative approach, and his views on aesthetics, language, and books.
Sebastien Tuzilovic: Morning Mark. I wanted to start with a question about books, seeing as how you work with them in your media and your art, and you’ve also had a career in publishing and print media. I’d love to know what you like to read.
Mark Gowing: Ah, reading. At the moment I’m reading a lot of nonfiction about the history of languages, because it’s really the history of the world. In a sense they’re one and the same, because language is heavily impacted by technology and culture at the time and so language is always evolving as technology evolves. We’re always in the middle of this process but we’re in the midst of quite a large shift at the moment.
S: I suppose this shift is especially prevalent in the context of AI, the internet, and the mass production of writing. Do you have anything to say about that?
M: It’s not a space I’m heavily involved in. I like looking at how time affects language. I quite like looking at deep time, looking at how language worked 3000 years ago compared to how it works now. It’s often not vastly different in its essence, but massively different in its execution. My understanding of ancient hieroglyphics is that they were created so the common person couldn’t read them. They were a form of snobbery, in a way. They were a kind of locking of the common person out. There were at the time two versions of writing in ancient Egypt, and one was common and one was not. It’s a fascinating idea that you intend to create a written language that people cannot read. The irony is that I can also be accused of this.
S: I wanted to ask about your creative process when it comes to language and art. You seem to see your art as its own kind of language. What does its inception look like?
M: The pictures begin as systems essentially and also as writing. I create the language systems themselves, which are abstracted letterforms that dictate composition. This eliminates the choice for me in terms of creating composition.
I also write prose, short form pieces that are personal to me, and streams of consciousness or internal dialogues. And then when you combine those pieces of writing with the systems, they create composition. These systems dictate the arrangement. And then it becomes kind of clinical after that… it becomes about drafting and executing this very exact composition. But all of the blood, if you like, is in that conceptual phase of the writing and the creation of the system. Once the concept is in motion, the outcome is dictated solely by the execution of the concept.
S: On that point around your personal prose and the composition of your work, and how the books you use in your art come from your own collection — often a highly personal collection — I was wondering if you can speak to what that means for your individuality, your personality, and the manner in which it connects with your art.
M: It’s taken me half my life to realise that I do, in fact, have a point of view. I think it comes from a lifetime spent in the study and practice of typography and the creation of books, which are obviously vehicles of typography. So there’s that entire combination of language from the ground up. It becomes like the entire typographic practice from the making of the font right through to the usage of that type in a publication and the commissioning of all the contents, and then the execution of that publication right through to delivering it to the world. I have an intricate understanding of the entire process that goes into the creation of books. I guess you would liken it to the chef who grows their own food, farms their own ingredients. This has led me to an artistic point where I use it to deconstruct everything that I know. What suits me best after a lifetime of building is probably destruction.
S: That seems quite inherently personal to build up this conception of yourself and then to go about destroying it, which is, I suppose, also another form of creation.
M: I think that’s exactly right. That’s right. Yeah, I am probably in a phase where I’m deconstructing everything about myself that I’ve done in my whole professional life. I’m now inside it, taking it apart and in that it’s a very personal journey where I’m unpacking everything that I’ve learned and relearning it.
S: You’ve stated that your new series of works exist between writing and art, feeling and form, and your works often explore words in a state of obscurity. Can you talk a little more about this space between, and the relationship between communication and art that you explore? You touched on this a little earlier when you were talking about the elitism in hieroglyphics.
M: I think the space that’s between language and art that I operate in is much like geometric abstraction, which is, I guess, a very 20th century art practice. In a way it’s an older modernist practice. But I’m revisiting it using language and systems as a tool for creating abstraction, and so that that language space becomes the vehicle for a new kind of abstraction… because it’s no longer constructing painting to a point where I set out to paint a circle. For the sake of painting the circle, I’m painting an arrangement of parts that’s dictated by language. The circle becomes an element of this language, imbued to me with some other meaning.
S: So you see it that the objects on the canvas aren’t what obstructs the language on the book pages, but it’s the language itself that you’ve created that obstructs?
M: Exactly. My process of language, the meaning that I embed in my work, dictates the visual outcomes alongside my emotional input. I guess the viewer’s interpretation becomes like this strange intuitive visual understanding of that emotional input without any complete comprehension. I just really like the way that things feel, like how you feeling your way through life is as important as understanding your way through life. I think the lack of exactness sometimes is more powerful. Maybe… maybe. That’s the big maybe of our work, I guess. You can’t dictate what any viewer is going to take from your work and that’s kind of beautiful, but the hope for me is that the energy and the emotion that I put into that writing process is somehow delivered through the visual outcomes. I hope this is transformed by the viewer. And I hope some of what I intend is somehow transferred in some strange and abstract way.
S: That’s very similar to what you’ve just described in the process of the creation of your art, one of deconstruction and construction. It’s interesting that you see the process of the viewer as similar to your own creative process, and similar also to the point about the deconstruction and construction of yourself.
M: Yeah, I think so, yes, yeah. I mean, it’s an indulgent thing to do. But I think that’s part of being an artist as well. I think in the end, your self is all you have.
S: You’ve written of encouraging feeling and intuition in the interpretation of your work. What is your conception of the responsibility of the viewer of art and how much of your art is a part of the viewer’s own creation of it?
M: The viewer is always right. I see it like this idea that I can speak endlessly about what I’m trying to do, but inevitably, whatever the viewer finds in the work is true. I don’t really like to say that this is the work and this is what it means, and if you don’t see that, then you’re wrong. That’s horrible. I like the idea that the viewer can take something away from it that I did not intend. That’s stunning to me. That’s their business, their absolute right to interpret. Their responsibility is just one of interpretation.
S: Do you think that the search for books to use in your art informs the final product?
M: Definitely. Often I need 20 copies of the same book, and so I end up pulling them in from all over the world online. I’ve bought a lot of things from Goulds too. But usually I’m not really trawling Sydney for books. I’m often trawling on the Internet for books. The bookstores are often a starting point I think.
Sometimes I’m just looking for subject matter. Sometimes I’m looking for timelessness in a book, because books do contain timelessness, as they contain time as well. I’m often searching for that. I’m often searching for general humanity in books also. So I buy books about nature and I buy books about art, and I buy books about history and human information. When you chop them up you end up with really dry raw materials that I quite enjoy working with. I find that those bigger subjects are nice to lean into emotionally as well, because they’re the essences of who we are and when you’re talking about languages, you talk of the bindings of humanity.
S: You mentioned earlier your career in typography. How has this influenced your visual art practice?
M: I started designing typefaces in the early 90s when the world was going through a digital boom. The very first digital typefaces were being created in the 80s and by the early 90s it was possible for a young designer like me to buy a Mac and make a font at home. I was deeply affected by the amount of experimentalism going on, in the period in typography. And people were really pushing it into abstraction, which ceased to exist after that period as much. Visual scripts and visual fonts and visual languages were pushed into strange areas where you question all of it, and I began to view the typographers as artists. They began to abstract type the way artists have abstracted images over the last couple of hundred years. And so for the last 30 years, I’ve just kept pushing that space. I’ve kept abstracting types and have continually worked with type as a medium that can be abstracted, used for expression in that art. It’s been an evolution and it’s basically led me to the point where I now have now. Now I’m just making this work.
S: It seems like your previous work, especially your photography, works with these views on time and timelessness, and you’ve just talked about books as a method of capturing time’s essence. Can you talk more on this? Especially that concept of the immortality within human mortality.
M: It’s something that I work consciously with. Futility and mortality are the things that I work with primarily. Inevitably, everything is futile. You want everything to be good and you want everything to work, but I think we all know inevitably it’s futile. The one thing that I learned making books is that they are long term. When you’re in the middle of one, it’s just about the time you’re spending on it and the effort you’re putting in it. As you get to the end of it, you realise this is going to be here when I’m gone. They sit in time in that form, for as long as they’re available. I think the media we’re using now doesn’t do that. The Internet is constantly changing. It’s not fixed. It’s beautiful to use books as a symbol of some version of immortality. There’s always that dichotomy in that combination of the book and the reader, the immortal book and the mortal person. And then you chop it up and you ruin it. You deconstruct it and you’re deconstructing this immortality in a way. But then you embed it into something else.
You can see This one is a song at the Damien Minton Presents Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney from 16-26 July 2025, Weds-Sat 11am-6pm
