Nayan Patel’s practice merges textual systems and material allegories to investigate how communication ossifies into symbol, often situating belief systems, whether bureaucratic, economic, or consumerist, within registers of absurd devotion or poetic collapse. In Object Permanence, he examines the conditions under which we trust that things continue to exist once they withdraw from sight. Borrowed from developmental psychology, the term describes the moment when a child understands that an object persists even in its absence. In the exhibition, Patel relates this cognitive structure to conflicting feelings around his native New Zealand, asking how belief in continuity is learned and maintained amid ongoing processes of erasure.

New Zealand’s contemporary landscape is shaped by accelerating urbanisation, driven by population growth, technological industry, and infrastructural expansion. Forests are cleared and wildlife displaced to make “space” for housing, roads, and cities, using a language of progress that echoes earlier colonial logics of extraction and control. A nation built on the removal of indigenous ecologies now grapples with how to reconcile protection, development, and historical responsibility. Living in London, Patel reflects on his distance from New Zealand and confronts the uneasy assumption that it will remain unchanged. Object Permanence becomes, in this sense, a framework for interrogating the psychological comfort of believing in the persistence and continuity under political and industrial pressure. Ideas of disappearance and persistence are rooted in Patel’s biography. The farm where he grew up in rural Kirikiriroa was formerly a landfill, a landscape built atop layers of buried waste, where discarded matter was meant to vanish yet continued to shape the ground beneath. This formative proximity to what is hidden but not gone threads through Object Permanence, informing Patel’s attention to residue, detritus, and the afterlives of materials.

Patel’s practice frequently uses found typography as image, underscoring the dissonance that can sometimes exist between design and effect. Drawing from Blood & Bone, the brand of fertiliser he used on hoed ground on the farm, Patel constructs the words Flesh and Stone from modular, colour-block-painted compositions of individual letters. Each letter adopts a different historical or stylistic font, from manuscript, modernist, and digital registers, gathered from fragments of text found and photographed around the city. Patel often looks to the design and language of advertising, where repetition, scale, and saturation assert dominance and clutter over public space, shaping modes of attention and cognition. In this sense, the plastering of signage across the urban environment becomes a form of accelerated instruction, nurturing recognition and desire through constant exposure.

The choice of the words Flesh and Stone, seemingly packaged as products in their colourful garb, in fact speaks more profoundly to a fundamental opposition: “Flesh” evokes the organic, transient, and living; “Stone” implies construction, permanence, monument, and inscription. A large ampersand (&), composed of painted Hahnemühle paper cut into strips, woven, and stretched, figuratively sutures the two text works together. A hinge and a fault line, it joins and separates two states of being. Patel treats these, Flesh and Stone, not as fixed opposites but as mutually contaminating materials: living matter that hardens into symbol, and inert matter reanimated through poetic projection. Within the context of New Zealand’s industrial and urban expansion, Flesh & Stone reveal themselves as perhaps unable to co-exist, distilling into words the tension between economic and infrastructural endeavour and natural heritage, and concealing its implicit violence behind the pop, colourful registers of advertising and consumption.

The exhibition’s ecological and political axis is further articulated through Guillotine, a large steel feather. The title acknowledges both the paper-cutting instrument Patel used for the woven work and something more fatal: a mechanised cut directed at life itself. In 2025, a new amendment bill was introduced to New Zealand’s Wildlife Act of 1953, which would authorise the killing of native wildlife (including the national kiwi bird) incidental to the infrastructural development. While framed as pragmatic necessity, the legislation recalls colonial histories in which native ecologies were systematically sacrificed in service of progress. Rendered in a material associated with industry, infrastructure, and extraction, Patel’s feather becomes a paradoxical monument: an emblem of lightness, flight, and vitality immobilised by weight. The work resonates with legislative shifts that have weakened protections for native bird species. The object stands not as representation but as residue, prompting the viewer to confront contradictions within notions of permanence.

Throughout Object Permanence, Patel returns to the logic of detritus: paper shredded as if for disposal; feathers moulted and swept from streets; fragments of language scavenged from the city's visual noise and refashioned into unstable messages. His use of paper, a processed wood remnant, translates living matter into a material of inscription and reincarnation, but also death and petrification. The works inhabit the uneasy territory between disappearance and persistence, between what systems attempt to bury and what inevitably remains. In this light, Object Permanence becomes less a psychological milestone than a political and ecological reckoning, an insistence that once seen, nothing truly disappears, and that the unseen, whether environmental harm, managed extinction, or buried waste, continues to press against the surface of the present.