Zac Langdon-Pole

Zac Langdon-Pole (Pākehā) is an award-winning artist who was honoured with a survey show at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi in 2020, only ten years after graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2010. That show, ‘Containing Multitudes’, felt “particularly special”, says Zac, and in the last three years, he has continued to exhibit his predominantly photographic and sculptural conceptual works to critical acclaim, in Australia, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Austria. In 2017, he won an Ars Viva Prize – for outstanding artists under the age of 35 based in Germany – and in 2018 he won a prestigious BMW Art Journey Prize at Art Basel, which enabled him to travel home to Tāmaki Makaurau from Europe via Hawai’i, the Marshall Islands and Samoa, following the flight paths of migratory birds and celestial navigators, working with researchers, artists and sailors at 20-odd stopovers over five months.

Represented by gallerist Michael Lett, Zac makes cerebral work which offers opportunities to look at the natural world – or rather, the entire universe – in unusual ways. He pairs cold stardust with submarine animals (meteorite fragments and nautilus shells); he puts images of galaxies within bird silhouettes within jigsaw puzzles (the work is indeed “containing multitudes”); he fills borer holes in wooden floor panels with gold. Curator Robert Leonard evokes William Blake to describe Zac’s work: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.”

Zac himself calls art a transformative, enlivening “enmeshment in the world”; a way to renew our relationship to the world we live in. “I get such an ecstatic buzz when a work comes to me and provides this connection. It’s like being fully tuned in,” he says. “Making art is not the easiest path to make a living, but it’s a pursuit driven by curiosity and learning. It allows me a plethora of new experiences every day.”

His aim is to give viewers both an initial surprise – “an arresting or estranging jolt, like, ‘what is this that I’m looking at?’” – and a longer, “more meditative experience”. He carefully composes works so their ideas and complexities unfold slowly – ideally indefinitely.

Elam equipped him with a community of friends and fellow artists for life, and with “a toolbox of skills to make, think through, write about and critique art. Art is like language, it takes many years to learn it, to use it, and to expand it.” His degree at Elam also enabled him to pursue postgraduate study at Frankfurt’s well-respected Städelschule, where he appreciated learning from renowned artist and teacher Willem de Rooij. Zac remembers one particularly powerful lesson delivered via a recurring joke. “Willem would always sign off class emails with a photo of Nancy Reagan holding up her infamous ‘JUST SAY NO’ sign.” While the First Lady was talking drugs, Zac agrees with Willem that being able to say no to critics who’ve missed the point – choosing when to take advice and from whom –  is “one of the most affirmative and powerful tools in an artist's toolbox”.

Now in his mid-thirties, Zac is hitting his stride. “I don’t have the same trouble with paying the bills and issues with anxiety that I faced in my twenties. I’d say I’m at a point where the experience I’ve gained makes what I do easier on some levels, but my relative youth makes me feel like my best work is still ahead of me.” Still, there’s one goal that’s proved elusive – so far. “I’ve always wanted to make a sculpture levitate!”