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.

Made up of thousands of individual puzzle pieces, Langdon-Pole’s large-scale jigsaw works reconfigure images of nineteenth-century Romantic landscape paintings, the marbled endpapers of volumes of encyclopedias, mythological paintings and the latest images from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. Inspired by the way we use prior experiences to make sense of Rorschach ink-blots, Langdon-Pole’s carefully recombined puzzles of two very different images create a third abstracted image – or what the artist refers to as a ‘ghost stencil’ – with its own meaning and purpose.

Positioned discreetly within the space and reminiscent of an arrangement of Zen garden contemplation stones, a new series of marble sculptures resemble what appear to be rocks, foliage and statuary drapery. Collectively titled Memory Garden 2024, each carving of a seemingly banal subject is a one-to-one scale reproduction of an iconic sculpture from the history of European art – albeit with the human figures removed. Seeking to foreground that which is often overlooked in our subconscious focus on the human, Langdon-Pole’s Memory Garden is haunted by absent figures, many of whom, in the artist’s words, ‘may be a lingering after-image of our memory’.