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John Newling was born in Birmingham in 1952 and has an acclaimed international reputation creating projects and installing works in the UK and many other countries. 

Now based in Nottingham, he is a pioneer of public art with a social purpose. His works explore the natural world and the social and economic systems of society – such as money or religion. To this end Newling has innovated the possibilities and benefits for art in a renewed social and conceptual framework.   

He belongs to a generation of artists whose work evolved from Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte Povera – art movements occurring during the 1960s that placed emphasis on the concept, process and site of the work, alongside material and aesthetic properties. 

During his time in America (1985), as the first recipient of a Fulbright fellowship in visual arts, Newling produced works in hotels, swimming pools, burnt out cars, sales of memorabilia and on the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC and New York. This experience marked the beginning of his enduring interest in notions of Place both in terms of cartography and context. This has generated many works over the following decades both gallery based and site specific.  

Reviews and critiques of his work have been included in, amongst others, Sculpture in 20th – Century Britain (Henry Moore Institute), Installation art in the new millennium: The empire of the senses (Thames and Hudson) and Leavingtracks: artranspennine98 (artranspennine98).  

Monographs on his work include The Sacred and The Mundane, Currency and Belief, Stamping Uncertainty, Westonbirt Wishes, Chatham Vines and An essential disorientation.  In 2005 a double volume monograph of his research essays from 1994 to 2005 was also published. Most recently a comprehensive monograph (Spinning) was published to coincide with his first survey exhibition, Ecologies of Value at Nottingham Contemporary 2013. 

His work has been exhibited in the Mineta Mova Gallery (Brussels), Jollenbeck Gallery (Cologne), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Santa Barbara), the Wellcome Collection (London), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Woodend Barn (Aberdeenshire), Attenborough Arts Centre (Leicester), Syson Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary & Lakeside Arts (Nottingham) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, among others.  

Nymans Language was a commission for the National Trust. It is an alphabet derived from leaves collected at the former West Sussex retreat of pioneering horticulturalists Leonard and Maud Messel (now a National Trust garden filled with rare and unusual plant collections). Although Newling describes his alphabet as a language, it is in fact a typographic font which can be downloaded, in which individual letters are replaced with symbols based on leaf shapes.