I cannot imagine, nor would I want to live in a world without difference . . . Difference coming into relation is what creates the world.¹

Like the sentiment of this quote from Caribbean author and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s influential book Poetics of Relation, Aotearoa New Zealand artist Zac Langdon-Pole is interested in how different histories, materials, people and processes shape and enrich our understanding of the world. Working primarily with collage and assemblage, many of the artist’s constructions juxtapose and recontextualise materials, textures, objects and histories. The outcome of these pairings and combinations are surprising, often unravelling what we thought we knew.

Langdon-Pole’s Another World Inside this One 2024 is loosely based on the antipodean saying — ‘it’s like Captain Cook’s axe’, a reference to an object that has been altered so many times that little remains of its original material. Though there is scant proof that Captain James Cook ever had, or wrote about, his own axe, this saying flows from a common belief that he did, and that the head of the tool was replaced twice and the handle six times, leaving nothing of the original object.² Langdon-Pole takes this concept a step further, in that he carves and paints the American hickory handle of a store-bought axe to resemble the tree sapling from which the wood would have been cut for its manufacture.

For many familiar with the saying, the importance of the tree — destroyed to craft the handle — is not even considered. The artist therefore points to the way in which deep connections to the natural world nurtured by the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania have been both overlooked and actively destroyed by European colonisers in their domination of these lands and their histories.

Acknowledging the origins of our personal and national histories can often feel bewildering; however, the poetic openness of Zac Langdon-Pole’s works shows us that, when we abandon the familiar, we are able to enter newly expanded realms that are alive to the rich wonders of our world and our place in it.

Endnotes

1. Édouard Glissant, quoted in ‘The West is not the West: Zac Langdon-Pole in conversation with András Szántó’, in Constellations: Zac Langdon Pole’s Art Journey, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, 2020, p.31.
2. Tim Alves, ‘Captain Cook’s axe’, West Space Journal, viewed June 2024.

Feature image: Zac Langdon-Pole / New Zealand b.1988 / Another World Inside this One 2024, installed at GOMA for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial, December 2024 / Steel, timber and synthetic polymer paint / Purchased 2024 with funds from David Thomas AM through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Zac Langdon-Pole / Photograph: C Callistemon, QAGOMA