I have written previously about how wrong I got it with the first version of my Study Statement. I rewrote it following the Unit 1 feedback, but very quickly decided that the second version wasn’t much better!
The problem was that I had over-academicised the whole thing. It was dry and not really a very good reflection of what I actually wanted to do. I think I had got caught up in trying to make the work sound sufficiently serious, as though the more theoretical language I could use, the more convincing the proposal would be. The result was something that sounded quite impressive (or at least I thought it did), but which I didn’t really recognise as my own practice.
There is probably something interesting going on there. Academic language can be useful in giving shape to ideas, making distinctions, and connecting what you are doing to a wider conversation. But it can also create a distance between the language and the thing it is supposed to describe. I wonder whether I was using it partly to disguise the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. It is quite easy to make something sound purposeful and coherent on paper, even when the reality of making things is much messier and less certain. Perhaps I was trying to resolve that uncertainty through the writing, rather than accepting it as part of the work.
There is also the question of who the language is for. I think I had started writing what I imagined an MA Study Statement ought to sound like, rather than something that would actually be useful to me. That isn’t to say that academic language is inherently a problem, or that the theoretical concerns aren’t genuine. They are. But I had allowed the language to get ahead of the practice, to the point where the statement seemed to be setting out a series of things I would have to demonstrate, rather than opening up possibilities for things I might make.
The Research Paper arrived at just the right time. It gave me somewhere to put a lot of the theoretical thinking and took some of the weight off the studio work. I could explore (some of) those questions in writing without feeling that every painting or collage had to somehow answer them.
It also helped me clarify what I am actually interested in at the moment and how those interests and activities sit within my existing practice. Perhaps more importantly, it reminded me that these interests were already there. I didn’t need to construct a completely new practice around a theoretical problem in order to justify the research.
So, I have rewritten the statement again. I joked with Betty yesterday that I probably should have just written, “I am going to make some things and see what happens.” In some ways, this latest statement is just a long-winded way of saying exactly that.
That’s not to suggest that the exercise hasn’t been useful. I think the process of rewriting it has helped me work out what I actually want to do, rather than what I think an MA Study Statement ought to say. There is probably a balance to be found between having enough of a framework to give the work some direction and leaving enough room for things to happen that I haven’t anticipated. I am not sure I have quite worked out where that balance lies, but I feel much more confident that this version is a sensible reflection of where I am and what I want to explore.
Having that in place feels useful as we head into Unit 3.
1. Working Title
The Weather of Painting: Images, Legibility and Generative AI
2. Aims and Objectives
This research asks what it means to make paintings within an image culture increasingly shaped by generative AI. I am interested in the ontological questions that AI raises around how images come into being: where they begin, what they are made from, what they retain from other images, and where agency or authorship might be located.
Rather than attempting to demonstrate a particular argument about AI through painting, I want these questions to form part of the conditions within which I make work. My practice will centre on painting and collage, using processes of selecting, cutting, recombining, repeating, obscuring, translating, and repainting images. The research will remain deliberately open to accident, intuition, play, and unexpected connections. I am interested in what happens when images move between different states and materials, and in allowing the process of making to generate questions that I could not necessarily have formulated beforehand.
An increasingly important way of thinking about this is through the phrase “the weather of painting.” Weather describes a set of conditions that we inhabit rather than control. It is changeable, unstable, and requires us to adapt to it. In a similar way, painting happens within a continually shifting environment of other images, technologies, histories, and conventions. Generative AI is one aspect of that weather, alongside photography, digital circulation, social media, reproduction, memory, art history, and the accumulated languages of painting itself.
I am particularly interested in emergence and legibility. How does an image gradually become present through accumulation, repetition, translation, and change? How much can we know from an image about the processes and materials through which it has come into being? What does an image reveal about its own construction, and what does it conceal?
These questions connect AI to longer-standing concerns within my practice around mediation, repetition, authenticity, origin, and the experience of looking.
Aims
1. To explore how painting and collage might operate within, respond to, and make use of the changing conditions of contemporary image culture, particularly those introduced or intensified by generative AI.
2. To investigate how images emerge, become legible or resist legibility through processes of repetition, mediation, fragmentation, concealment, and material transformation.
Objectives
- To develop a body of paintings and collages that responds experimentally to contemporary image culture without requiring individual works to illustrate or prove predetermined theoretical propositions.
- To explore “the weather of painting” as a way of thinking about practice, considering how painting responds to changing technological, visual, cultural, and material conditions.
- To investigate the emergence of images through making, paying particular attention to how fragments, sources, memories, repetitions, and previous images persist and mutate within new work.
- To experiment with degrees of legibility and illegibility, exploring what paintings and collages reveal or conceal about their sources, construction, and histories.
- To use repetition, translation and movement between media—including printmaking, cutting, collage, photography, drawing, and painting—as ways of discovering rather than predetermining images.
- To bring theoretical research into dialogue with studio practice, particularly Derrida’s ideas around trace, repetition, and presence, while allowing practical experimentation to redirect, complicate, or contradict the theoretical research.
3. Context
The research sits within the long history of painting responding to changes in how images are produced and circulated. Photography, mechanical reproduction, mass media, and digital technologies have repeatedly altered painting’s relationship with representation, originality, and authorship. Painting has not simply been replaced by these technologies but has continually absorbed, resisted, and responded to them.
Collage is important within this history because it disrupts the idea of the image as something originating from a single unified source. From early twentieth-century collage onwards, artists have cut, borrowed, reproduced, and relocated existing material. The fragment carries something of its previous context while becoming something else through its new relationships. This history has particular relevance to generative AI, where images also emerge through complicated relationships with pre-existing visual material, although through very different technological processes.
Generative AI intensifies questions around origin, repetition, and authorship because the relationship between an output and the materials that contributed to it is difficult to see. Images can appear coherent and self-contained while their sources and processes of production remain largely inaccessible. The apparent completeness of the surface can therefore sit alongside considerable uncertainty about how that image came into existence.
This has led me increasingly towards the question of legibility. I am using legibility in a broader sense than simply whether the subject of an image can be recognised. I am interested in whether an image allows its own construction to be read. Where has it come from? What has happened to it? What remains from an earlier state? What has been concealed or absorbed?
AI-generated imagery provides an especially pronounced version of this problem. The image may be visually convincing and immediately readable while revealing very little about the enormous technological and cultural apparatus that has produced it. Painting can operate quite differently, but it also moves between revealing and concealing. Brush marks, corrections, underpainting, joins, and previous decisions can remain visible, but paint is equally capable of covering its own history.
Collage provides another useful point of comparison. A visible cut can identify an image as constructed, while a carefully disguised join can suppress that history. I am interested in moving between these different degrees of visibility rather than treating transparency as inherently more valuable than concealment.
My research around these questions is informed by Jacques Derrida, particularly his thinking around trace, repetition, and presence. Derrida offers a way of questioning the idea that an image, idea or object can possess a completely stable and self-contained origin. What appears in the present carries traces of other things, while repetition inevitably produces alteration rather than perfect duplication. These ideas are relevant to generative AI, but also to much older processes of painting, copying, quotation, recollection, and appropriation.
They allow me to think about a painting not as an image that begins at a single point, but as something that emerges from an accumulation of encounters, remembered images, previous works, material decisions, and acts of repetition.
The project is also informed by contemporary discussion around digital images, circulation, and technological visibility, including the writing and work of artists and theorists such as Hito Steyerl, whose work considers the changing status and movement of images within digital culture.
Within contemporary art, artists working with machine learning have often concentrated on the technology itself, its datasets or its social and political implications. My research approaches these questions from a somewhat different direction. AI is important, but I am increasingly less interested in making work about AI than in considering how AI has changed the wider environment within which images and paintings now exist.
This is where the idea of the weather of painting becomes useful. AI does not replace everything that preceded it. It joins photography, cinema, reproduction, the internet, social media, art history, and personal memory as part of the visual atmosphere through which contemporary painters move.
The painter is therefore not outside these conditions, observing them objectively. They are already embedded within them.
4. Methodology
The methodology will be practice-led, iterative, and deliberately flexible. Rather than establishing a sequence of controlled experiments in advance, I will use painting and collage as exploratory processes through which questions can develop.
The primary activity will be making. I will work with a mixture of found, borrowed, photographed, remembered, and self-generated imagery. Images may be printed, cut apart, rearranged, drawn from, painted over, repeated, photographed again, or translated between different materials.
Collage will be particularly important because of its speed and flexibility. It allows images to be broken apart and recombined without requiring their relationships to be fully understood beforehand. A cut, overlap, gap, or accidental conjunction can suggest possibilities that would be difficult to arrive at through planning alone. Some collages may function as works in themselves; others may become starting points for paintings or disappear into later stages of the process.
Painting will operate more slowly. Translating an image into paint introduces another set of decisions around scale, material, surface, colour, editing and duration. I will pay attention to what survives these translations and what disappears.
Repetition will also be an important studio method. I may make multiple versions of an image, return to earlier compositions or allow elements from previous works to reappear. Rather than treating repetition as duplication, I will look at the differences generated through each recurrence.
The question of legibility will be explored practically. At times I may deliberately expose cuts, layers, corrections, or sources; at others I may conceal or absorb them. I want to investigate the point at which an image becomes coherent and to consider what might have to be suppressed for that coherence to occur.
Theoretical research will run alongside studio activity rather than determine it. Derrida’s concepts of trace, repetition, and presence will provide useful ways of thinking about what happens in the work, alongside selected research into digital images, AI, and contemporary painting. Reading will generate questions and possibilities for making, but studio activity must also be capable of disrupting or redirecting the theoretical research.
I will document the development of the work through photography and a research journal. Rather than using a rigid template, the journal will record decisions, failures, unexpected discoveries, recurring images, and connections between reading and practice. Periodic reviews of this material will help identify patterns that may not have been apparent while making.
Crits, tutorials, and discussions with other artists will provide another form of research. These will be particularly useful in understanding what viewers can and cannot read from the work without explanation: what appears intentional, what appears accidental, what histories remain perceptible, and what has become hidden.
The overall methodology therefore operates as a continuing movement between:
making → looking → reading → reflecting → making again
rather than as a linear progression towards proving a hypothesis.
5. Outcomes
The outcomes of the research will necessarily remain somewhat open because one of the intentions of the project is to allow the work to develop through experimentation rather than to predetermine its final form.
The principal outcome will be a body of paintings and collages developed through the research. These may include resolved paintings alongside smaller studies, fragments, collage works, and groups of related images. Editing and selection will therefore form an important part of the later stages of the project.
The final presentation may make visible some of the relationships between works rather than presenting each painting as an entirely isolated object. Groups, repetitions, variations, or sequences may allow the process through which images have emerged to remain perceptible.
The research should also produce a clearer articulation of “the weather of painting” as a way of thinking about contemporary practice: not as a fixed theory, but as a means of describing the changing technological, cultural, and visual conditions within which painting currently takes place.
A further outcome will be a deeper understanding of my own relationship with images: how I select them, repeat them, remember them, alter them, and allow them to pass between different media.
Rather than concluding with a definitive argument about what painting can or should do in response to generative AI, I hope the project will establish a more productive set of questions around how images emerge, what they carry with them, what they make legible, what they conceal, and what happens to them when they enter the material and temporal processes of painting.
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