09.10.25
Design
Abstract form
At LEIF, collaboration is a way of seeing anew — uncovering fresh perspectives on the forms and materials around us. Each year, our Holiday Collection becomes a meeting point between art and design, where botanicals are reframed through different creative minds. More than seasonal keepsakes, these limited editions are experiments in perspective, inviting our community to see the familiar anew.
For 2025, we turned to the Sydney-based artist and typographer Mark Gowing, whose vision moves fluidly between visual abstraction, language and form.
For more than three decades, Gowing worked at the intersection of graphic design and art, creating systems that transform letters into geometry and uncover hidden structures in language. Through his independent type foundry, The Letters, he continues to explore typography as both craft and concept. But in recent years, his attention has shifted more deliberately toward art, evolving into what he calls a “more open, less constrained” practice.
Gowing has always considered himself to be a “bit of an outsider”. “As I got older and my practice got richer, my personal inquiries got richer and richer, [and] I was constantly hitting a ceiling, working in design, where I couldn't really apply my learnings and my work to what my clients needed,” he explains. “I needed to change.”
“I needed to evolve my creative practice into something that was more open and less constrained by commercial realities.”
It was a shift that required time and patience. “It didn’t really feel right to call myself an artist until I had a body of work that was voluminous enough for me to be happy with. It took a few years to work hard on it and concentrate on it.”
Now, however, his time is focussed exclusively on his art practice. Though even as it expanded, Gowing never abandoned typography. “It's self-initiated,” he says. “And most of my art, in one way or another, is typographic.”
For LEIF’s 2025 Holiday Collection, the visual language took shape through what Gowing refers to as “Urban Flower”, a work developed from a “language system of counter circles”, indicating counter forms of each letter of the alphabet. As Gowing explains, the circles occupy negative spaces — “vaguely, roughly, abstractly” — and through the application of the language (in this case, the word “Holiday” and Gowings’ own name). What emerged was a constellation of forms that appear at once geometric and organic.
“The circular format references both the form of a blossoming flower, as well as its inherent cycles of growth. While the constellation of dots suggests the scattering of pollen and the unfolding of petals.”
Rendered in metallic tones, the piece carries the duality of Gowings’ title: part nature, part city; both rooted in the organic, and refracted through industrial surfaces.
“It became this “Urban Flower”, which is perhaps in this case, even more poignant.”
That balance of natural and constructed is not incidental. Gowing’s affinity with plants and gardens runs deep, formed in his childhood in the north end of the Central Coast, New South Wales. “At the time it was very rural and my family had a garden centre there that was right in the middle of the area. The whole community shopped there.”
Plants were simply part of life: “Everybody in our environment… they all love gardens. They all love plants for their own reasons. And it was just normal. I didn't know there was another way of living,” he says. “Gardening is a natural progression for me, and it’s something inherent that I can’t imagine not having, really.”
This personal history threads through his response to LEIF’s botanicals for Holiday 2025: inspired by natural sources, reframed through a system that transforms words into forms as a large-scale circular artwork — a metallic bloom that lingers between language, geometry, nature and city.
