JOnathan callan

For more than three decades, Jonathan Callan (b. 1961, Manchester) has developed a practice centred on the physical life of information and the different languages through which we organise and understand experience. Working with books, maps, musical scores, photographs and other printed matter, he approaches these materials not simply as carriers of meaning, but as objects with their own weight, structure and resistance. Books and pages are cut, drawn over, layered, buried, compressed or embedded in plaster, silicone and resin. Callan has described coming to regard books much as a potter regards clay: as material to be handled, tested and transformed. As he writes, “How we reduce our experiences of the world to different languages plays an incredibly significant role in how we then understand it.”

His interventions unsettle the expectation that printed information should remain stable or that an artist’s treatment of a text should necessarily illustrate its content. Instead, words can become image, pages become strata and familiar systems of communication can be made strange or newly visible.

This exhibition brings together fourteen works spanning more than two decades, from 2004 to works made in 2026. Across this period, Callan’s methods and materials continually change while the underlying enquiry persists. Printed matter is drawn over, cut apart, combined, concealed or embedded; plaster, silicone and resin introduce different physical conditions. Individual works can appear markedly distinct from one another, yet remain connected by questions of how information is constructed, communicated and understood.

Musical notation forms one thread running through the exhibition. Callan’s attraction to it began long before his hearing deteriorated and, as he explains, sprang from the same interest that drew him to books, maps, and other modes of information. In Gigue, relative too (2004), a point is isolated on the page and every note is drawn towards it, creating what Callan describes as a new perspective both visually and musically. Years later, musical notation acquired a more personal significance through Callan’s progressive hearing loss. In two works whose titles incorporate their original page references, Things I’ll never hear, p.29 and Things I’ll never hearp.257 (both 2022), the conventions of the musical score are altered in different ways. In Things I’ll never hear, p.29, each note is replaced by a circle that gradually increases in size down the page, an image Callan likens to an improbable snowstorm in which the flakes become larger as they approach the earth. Although Callan does not read musical notation, he deliberately respects the accuracy of its printed format while introducing changes that might initially appear authentic, giving the score what he calls a “surreal dimension.”

In Things I’ll never hear. Parsifal. P.112, this transformation becomes increasingly material. Callan covers each note in black, adds a colour close to that of the blank paper and applies slow-setting epoxy resin. As the resin moves across the page, the pigments fuse and bleed into one another. Here the altered score is connected directly to Callan’s experience of progressively losing frequencies: he describes sound becoming “a soup of compressed noise” in which space disappears.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, information takes on almost geological properties. In Sheet music and the mind (2013–2020), a collection of books, including sheet music and a volume on the mind, is covered with sieved plaster. The loose material settles according to its natural “angle of repose” before hardening into peaks. Callan connects this process to scree, avalanches, landslides, sediment and snowfall, considering time as much a material in the work as the plaster itself. Meaning, too, becomes something capable of accumulating and hardening. As he writes, “Humans are creatures of meaning, Where we can’t find it we invent it.”

Information assumes a similarly geological structure in The Plastic Arts (2023). Pages removed from a book on classical sculpture are placed in a wooden mould beneath alternating layers of plaster. Information becomes deeply buried, remaining legible only at the exposed margins, which Callan compares to strata in sedimentary rock. The work belongs to a recurring interest in natural processes - both biological and geological - that runs through his practice.

The transformation of information does not always depend upon concealment. Callan is equally interested in the unexpected relationships that emerge when publications are cut apart, combined or allowed to contradict their apparent subject matter. In Great disasters in the universe (2016), for example, two publications meet physically: Great Disasters is guillotine-cut into five organic forms and inserted into a second publication.

This is particularly apparent in recent works in resin. In European conflict around an atlas to the stars (2026), the pigmentation of the books becomes integral to the work’s appearance. A book on Europe, printed on magenta paper, forms its outer edge, while the inner publication is not an atlas of the cosmos, as the title might initially suggest, but a book on film stars. The resulting circular object resembles, in Callan’s description, a sliced fruit or planet with a mobile core. In Painting around Science (2026), publications embedded in epoxy resin are arranged in broad forms that Callan thinks of as large brushstrokes. A book on Victorian painting encloses weekly periodicals on science, producing an unexpected reversal: the scientific material is the more colourful of the two, while the book concerned with art is comparatively subdued. The work brings printed information towards painting, not through representation but through the colour and material properties already contained within the publications themselves.

Underlying these transformations is a wider questioning of the status we give to information. Callan observes that “We regard information as a sacred thing”, becoming distressed by its destruction or removal while at the same time producing more information than we are capable of absorbing. As he puts it, “the world currently produces more information than it can ever digest. It may be our biggest pollutant.” In A Dutch Waterfall (2020), lines of text describing the National Gallery’s collection of Dutch art generate hand-drawn descending curtains, each flowing over the next. Information remains the source of the work, but its language is transformed into a visual event.

Across the fourteen works in the exhibition, information is never treated as neutral or immaterial. At a moment when information is increasingly generated, mediated and consumed through digital and artificial systems, this sustained attention to its physical form feels particularly resonant. Language becomes surface; pages become strata; notation becomes image; and printed information acquires weight, colour and texture.

Callan lives and works in London and is based at his studio at the London Dockyard in Woolwich. He studied at Goldsmiths College of Art before completing postgraduate studies in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1993, he was awarded a Henry Moore Fellowship in Sculpture. He has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions in London, New York, Cologne, Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva and Pittsburgh, among others. His work has also been presented at institutions including Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; The Drawing Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Yale University Art Gallery; Teylers Museum, Haarlem; and the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Callan’s work is held in major public and institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The British Museum, London; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; the Whitworth, Manchester; the British Council Collection; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Princeton University Art Museum; Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Germany; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; and South London Gallery.