Mark Gowing

Website: https://markgowing.com/

Email: mark.gowing@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Felicity Fenner, Uros Cvoro

Mark Gowing is an artist and typographer living and working on Gadigal/Wangal country, Sydney, Australia. Through a creative practice spanning more than 35 years he has developed a personal inquiry into the poetry of form, grid and rhythm that he investigates using abstracted applications of text and systems. At the core of Gowing’s practice are systems of visual abstraction that appropriate the basic Latin alphabet. Gowing’s written phrasing is transformed into pulsating structures that shift between language and geometric abstraction. This process magnifies the hidden frequencies of writing, allowing simple statements to expand into rhythmic forms that can be read as both systematic and expressive.

Beyond his artistic practice Gowing is the founder and director of The Letters, a type company that specialises in the development of expressive fonts, and was founder of the groundbreaking arts publisher Formist Editions as well as the seminal Longform Editions sound art project.

Through his highly acclaimed studio practice, Gowing has produced creative projects for leading organisations and institutions with a passionate focus on the arts. His typographic work has been awarded and exhibited globally by institutions including the Alliance Graphique Internationale, New York Type Directors Club and Tokyo Type Directors Club. He has been honoured with solo exhibitions at the 22nd International Poster Biennale in Warsaw, Poland; the Divieto d’Affissione in Turin, Italy; and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Gowing’s work is held in numerous institutional collections including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, USA.