Megan Dunn is Curator Special Projects at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.

A is for addictive! Last year I discovered the alphabet paintings of Tamaki Mākaurau Auckland based artist Julian Hooper and was instantly hooked. Since 2018, Hooper has amassed multiple drawings and paintings of the alphabet. His palette is stylised and pared back, often black and white, like an ‘old-school blackboard.’ For instance, in Numbered alphabet each letter is formed by numbers. The letter B is ingeniously composed of a pair of number 2s.

Julian refers to his work as graphic design with a psychological twist.

Indeed. He also fashions portraits of faces from letters and numbers. That’s how I fell in love with God, a black and white painting like a large inverse scrabble tile for the capital letter G. The background is black, the G forms the profile of an unlikely face, the little o and the little d, are God’s eyes. God has a moustache, perhaps.

I knew what I wanted to happen next. I wanted to see Julian Hooper make a foldout alphabet frieze! I imagined it as a takeaway item visitors could open like a concertina and pin to their walls. How delightful.

The City Gallery satellite exhibition The Letter celebrates the last decade of Hooper’s practice and yes it includes a new takeaway alphabet frieze. When Julian and I started working together on this show – sifting through his numerous workbooks and sketches – we didn’t know the gallery would need to temporarily close down in its Civic Square premises and relocate to the National Library gallery on Molesworth St.

S is for synergy! This gallery, housed in a library, has ended up being the perfect fit for a show about letters with a psychological twist.

The National Library gallery has a large glass walled window box with black blinds that can be rolled down. That window prompted a new work. “Because I am a painter, I saw the space as long strips of paper rather than a room…” Julian decided to create drawings on black paper to hang down over the curtains. He made the drawings in Auckland, rolled them up and carried them here by plane. The letters on each strip of paper are stacked up like the wire frames of chairs. The capital letter A stacks easily, whereas the letter C hangs down like a chain from the top of the ceiling. “The gag is how they are stacked in different ways,” Julian says. “Some hang, some stack, some are compact, others are impossible.”

His alphabet window work is like a store room, “a repository of potential”, the letters ready to be unstacked and used in different ways.

Hooper makes designing the alphabet appear playful and effortless. But beware…

Recently Hooper took a workshop in the gallery for people to design their own alphabet friezes. Participants brought along an object from home as a design prompt. I bought my keys with a little crocodile keyring figurine attached. Other people’s objects included a windmill trinket, dried opium poppy bowls, a Mother Teresa sculpture and a banana peel.

I drew my key, with its serrated mouth. Then decided to turn it into a crocodile’s open mouth. But you try making the letter D from the jaws of a crocodile! It ain’t that easy.

Another woman was trying to make an alphabet out of a windmill…Good luck!

Julian was a gracious, thoughtful host. “That’s great, Megan,” he said looking at my snappy crocodile.

But he also knows the alphabet isn’t as easy as it looks. “You can think of hundreds of things that begin with letter T but are not shaped like a T…and with X I struggled…I couldn’t find a xerox machine shaped like an x…”

Nonetheless his new frieze is just as delightful as I imagined, unfolding across the wall in black and white. A is for attic. G is for a gracious looping giraffe. Q is for a confounding little quail. But what is X?

Come and see.

Julian Hooper: The Letter is on at the National Library to November 16, 2024, free entry.

IMAGE Numbered Alphabet, Julian Hooper, 2021, acrylic on canvas, courtesy of Julian Hooper collection
IMAGE God, Julian Hooper, 2021, acrylic on canvas, courtesy of Steven Zanoski collection.
IMAGE Julian Hooper: The Letter, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2024. Photo: Cheska Brown.