SCAPE Public Art Season 2025

Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre is delighted to host four works by aspiring artists as part of SCAPE Public Art’s Season 2025. 

The Theme 2025: The Limits of Language

This season explores the edges of expression—the places where language falters, fractures, or fails entirely. Drawing on visual, sonic, and spatial practices, the artists assembled here investigate how meaning is made, disrupted, and remade beyond the boundaries of spoken and written word.

Language is often celebrated as a vessel of clarity, a tool for communication, and a marker of identity. Yet, it also reveals its own inadequacies: the untranslatable, the ineffable, the censored, the silenced. Words may carry weight, but they are also elastic, slippery, and sometimes insufficient to hold the full complexity of experience, memory, or emotion. What happens when language breaks down? What other forms of articulation arise in its place?

Working across a variety of materials and contexts, six artists engage with language both as material and as limit. They examine the politics of naming and the poetics of silence; they explore gesture, code, texture, and absence as alternative modes of communication. Some works reflect the linguistic dissonance of diasporic or multilingual experience. Others challenge dominant narratives by resisting easy readability or coherence.

In foregrounding what cannot be said—or can only be partially said—The Limits of Language invites audiences to encounter language not as a closed system, but as a site of tension, invention, and transformation. It asks: where do our words end, and what begins when they do?

The sculptures displayed:

• Noelle Nash-Austrin, Play with your words (South Quad) 

• Ivy Annette Gardiner Arcus, Lost for Words (South Quad)

• Anh Le, Climbing the steps of your life (Market Square)

• Sahansa Dasindi Karunarathna, Our world of symbols (Market Square)

For more public art, pick up a SCAPE Public Art pocket guide with map from Rutherford’s Den. 

More info: www.scapepublicart.org.nz