So, I’m still not entirely convinced by my study statement. I don’t think it is wrong exactly, and I don’t think I’m completely barking up the wrong tree, but I do have a growing suspicion that I have tried to over-academicise the whole thing. I have spent a lot of time trying to give the project a clear theoretical shape, and to place it within conversations around AI, painting, ontology, authorship and image production. All of that still matters to me, but I’m starting to feel that the statement has got slightly ahead of the work, rather than growing out of it.
There’s probably a danger in trying to solve the research too early through writing. The more I try to pin everything down, the more I risk closing off the uncertainty that made the project interesting in the first place. I keep saying that painting might be a way of testing or negotiating uncertainty, but I’m not sure that I am currently allowing enough uncertainty into the studio itself. The research has become quite tightly framed around generative AI and the conditions under which images come into being. These are useful concerns, but they are also quite heavy. They almost make the studio feel overburdened before anything has really had a chance to happen.
At the same time, I am beginning to think that the research paper might be the place where some of that weight can properly sit. Perhaps the writing does not need to be carried so directly by the paintings themselves. The paper can do some of the heavier theoretical work around AI, ontology, authorship, extraction, datasets and image production. That might actually free the studio work up a bit. Rather than asking every painting to visibly perform the whole research question, the written component can hold some of that complexity, allowing the paintings to operate with more ambiguity, instinct and play.
So, for the next couple of months, I think I need to loosen my grip on the study statement a bit. I don’t want to abandon it, but I do want to step back from it. I want to make work that is more intuitive and less weighed down by the pressure to constantly think about the research question. I think I need a period where the work can find its own momentum again, without every decision being immediately filtered through the language of AI, ontology, data, extraction or technical systems.
This also aligns with a practical issue within the project. The study statement requires a baseline group of paintings, a bounded dataset that can later be used as a point of comparison, translation, disruption or reworking. At first, my plan was that this group would come from my existing catalogue of work. That would have been efficient, but I’m now less convinced it is the right approach. Existing work already carries too much history. It belongs to previous contexts and previous concerns. If I use it as the baseline, I may end up bringing too many assumptions into the project before it has properly started.
Instead, I want to make the baseline from scratch. I want to spend a couple of months painting and collaging in a way that is as intuitive as possible. I know that being completely “unencumbered” is probably impossible. I can’t unknow the questions I have been asking, and I can’t pretend that thinking about AI has not changed the way I now look at images. But I can at least try to make work that does not directly illustrate those concerns. I can try to let the paintings come from impulse and habit, but also from play, memory, doubt and studio accident.
One thing that has come back into the studio recently is my interest in text within painting. I have always loved a bit of text in a painting. It’s something I return to again and again. I was reminded of this during the low residency weeks, particularly in the Concrete Poetry session, which I enjoyed much more than I had expected. There was something really useful in thinking about words not only as things to be read, but as visual material. It made me think again about language as something with rhythm, weight, spacing and shape, and about how it can sit inside an image without having to behave like explanation.
More specifically, I think I have always loved signage. I like the bluntness of it and the publicness of it. I like the way it tells you something while often becoming strange, funny or poetic by accident. Signs are supposed to be clear. They point, instruct, warn, prohibit, advertise or name. But in the real world they’re rarely as stable as that. They fade, peel, get painted over, become outdated, lose letters, contradict their surroundings, or start to look absurd when removed from their original context.
I think part of this comes from living in Glasgow, where signs often feel like contested surfaces rather than fixed messages. Shop signs, road signs, bus stops, billboards and temporary notices are constantly being graffitied over, stickered, scratched, amended or half-obscured. The original message is still there, but it has been interrupted by other voices and other forms of marking. Sometimes the graffiti is aggressive, sometimes funny, sometimes completely throwaway, but it changes the sign’s authority. It makes the sign less like a clean instruction and more like a conversation, or an argument, happening in public.
That feels useful to me. Signage sits somewhere between language and image, between instruction and vibes. A sign can be read, but it can also be looked at as colour, shape, surface and object. It carries authority, but often a very fragile kind of authority. A stencil, a shopfront, a road marking, a warning label, a temporary notice or a hand-painted sign can all suggest systems of order, while also revealing the human and material mess around those systems. They are made to organise the world, but they are constantly being interrupted by weather, time, misuse, graffiti and interpretation.
This seems to connect quite naturally with my wider interests, even if I’m trying not to force the connection too quickly. Signage is already a kind of everyday ontology. It tells us what something is, where we are, what we are allowed to do, and what category something belongs to. It names and directs. It tries to make the world legible. But the more I look at signs, the more unstable they seem. They are full of slippage between word and thing, intention and use, design and decay. When a sign is graffitied over, that instability becomes even more visible. Its meaning isn’t erased exactly, but it is altered, challenged, dirtied, layered and made less certain. That feels much closer to the kind of uncertainty I want to explore through painting than a purely theoretical statement about AI.
I have also been thinking about Sarah Morris in this context, particularly the way her paintings often draw on the visual language of cities, systems, architecture, branding and corporate space. Her use of text and graphic structure interests me because it does not simply function as writing to be read. It becomes part of a wider visual system, a surface of codes, signals, names and urban rhythms. In that sense, the text isn’t just descriptive. It feels embedded in the machinery of the image. It suggests how cities communicate through signs, façades, advertising, place names and institutional languages.
That feels relevant to what I’m trying to do, because I’m not really interested in text as a caption or explanation. I’m more interested in what happens when language becomes part of the visual weather of a painting. In Morris’s work, I am drawn to the sense that text can point towards larger systems of power, movement and organisation without having to explain them directly. That seems useful for me, especially if I am thinking about signage as something that tries to make the world legible, but also reveals how unstable and constructed that legibility is.
I recently bought some stencils to play around with, and I have been enjoying using them in the studio. That word “enjoying” feels important. There has not been much room for it in the study statement. The stencils give me a straightforward way to act without overthinking. They introduce a structure, but one that can be misused, blurred, repeated, painted over or made awkward. They bring in associations with signage, warning, instruction and utility, but they also allow for mistakes, bleed, pressure, unevenness and touch. They promise clarity but almost immediately become compromised.
I might channel my inner Ed Ruscha for a couple of months and see what happens. Not by imitating him directly, but by allowing myself to be interested in the relationship between words, surfaces, humour, atmosphere and image. Alongside that, Sarah Morris gives me another way to think about text, not only as deadpan statement or graphic interruption, but as part of a larger visual system connected to cities, signage, networks and power. The Concrete Poetry session has also given me another way into this, because it reminded me that language can be handled almost physically. It can be arranged, displaced, compressed or scattered. I’m also interested in how signs behave when they stop being useful, or when they are interfered with by other marks. A word on a painting does not have to direct anyone anywhere. It can hover, mislead, announce itself, fail to explain, or become part of the weather of the image.
For now, this feels like a useful way forward. Rather than trying to refine the study statement again straight away, I want to make the work that the statement will eventually have to answer to. I want to build a baseline that feels genuinely mine. Not simply a pre-existing archive, and not a set of paintings designed to satisfy the theory, but a body of work made through curiosity, instinct, repetition and play. Signage feels like a way back into that. It gives me language without explanation, structure without certainty, and a way of letting the paintings speak without having to know exactly what they are saying yet.
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