Daniel John Pilkington

Iconicities

July 3rd – 25th, 2026

Writing is the visible form of language. It consists of various signs, glyphs, marks, and characters. Typically, the reading eye, absorbed in the reconstruction of linguistic meaning, passes over the materiality of these forms. Yet concrete and visual poetries foreground the visual and physical presence of writing, revealing a fundamental dualism: that writing is both a material object and a vessel of signification. When the intention to signify is itself written into the process of material production, or the process of production is written into the text, the resulting poem, or work of art, could be considered ‘iconic’.

Iconicities explores this idea through a series of visual poems in which language is treated not simply as a transparent vehicle for meaning, but as a material, spatial, and physical form. The letterpress prints use indexical words such as ‘this’, ‘that’, and ‘it’, folding reference back onto the conditions of their own production. Because the poems are embossed rather than inked, they exist as physical deformations of the paper itself. The bronze sculpture, ‘Alphabet Rod’, similarly transforms language into a physical structure, extruding the Latin alphabet into a continuous three-dimensional form in which each letter morphs into the next. Developed using architectural modelling software and 3D printing, the work references the standard metre bar, while also suggesting the form of a ritual object.

Daniel John Pilkington