Repetition becomes central to the exhibition’s conceptual and physical vocabulary. It functions simultaneously as discipline, punishment, ritual and endurance. The repeated inscription of vowels recalls exercises in handwriting, rote learning and institutional correction – gestures tied to classroom structures and systems of authority.

Gow Langsford is pleased to present a new body of work by Hugo Koha Lindsay (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Maru). With a practice that is based in abstraction, Lindsay is interested in how everyday life and its systems are increasingly mediated and structured through abstract processes and language. His paintings are displays of experimental mark-making, layered structures and material interventions such as cutting, sewing and reworking canvases to reveal painting as an ongoing, interdisciplinary process.

This series of work explores language at the point of collapse – where meaning becomes unstable, fragmented and obscured through repetition, labour and acts of physical disruption. Across the surfaces of each canvas, vowel sounds in both English and te reo Māori are repeated endlessly in cursive script, written through the reverse of the canvas so that they appear backwards.

After the surfaces are inscribed, the canvases are cut or torn into measured sections, reordered and sewn back together. These gestures are not acts of repair, but of determined rupture and obfuscation. Sewing operates less as craft than as labour and control; a disciplined act in which language is consciously separated from lucidity, destabilising any potential comprehension.