Is there a place for AI in my practice?

There’s an irony in this. A blog about AI, and right now I’m using Claude to take my spoken words and shape them into a draft I can stand behind. It isn’t changing my ideas. It’s taking them down in my own words, adjusting the punctuation, smoothing the small snags — because writing, for me, is where I get stuck. I come up against a wall. And here, AI is an extraordinary tool.

AI is a difficult thing to approach as an artist right now. Post a single AI-generated image and you already feel like something of a fraud — because it has been generated, and if generation isn’t your practice, the image isn’t yours. It feels false, and it should, because it is. It isn’t the work.

That said, I do use it, within clearly defined limits. I’ve used AI to test how one of my paintings might sit within a gallery context — pertinent at a time when access to those spaces is so hard to come by. It allows me to ask practical, formal questions: how does the painting read at scale on a white wall? How does it hold in a particular frame? Framing is a real production cost, one most artists can’t absorb, and yet the work still needs to be presented appropriately, with the same rigour that went into its making.

So I use AI in that register only: as a visualisation tool for the work in situ. I recently completed a commission and the client sent me a photograph of the wall it was destined for. Being able to place the painting in that environment — to consider its scale, its relationship to the architecture and the light — was genuinely useful to the dialogue between us.

But even that mock-up, posted on Instagram, leaves me feeling fraudulent. I feel obliged to caveat it, to explain myself, which is a shame. It isn’t that AI is taboo for an artist to discuss. It’s taboo to use, if your practice isn’t concerned with it.

Not long ago every platform was saturated with companies selling an app that would drop your painting onto somebody’s wall. The results were dreadful: generic furniture, no context, nothing of the painting’s materiality or presence. And people paid for it. My first reaction was revulsion. But on reflection, there is real value in seeing the work installed, even provisionally, especially while it’s still in the studio.

In my own studio the paintings accumulate — stacked one behind another as I work towards a coherent body of work. Lifting them out and placing them on a wall, even virtually, lets me ask whether they belong together. Because so much of my work is narrative-driven, each painting carrying its own story, the question becomes one of sequence and encounter. If a viewer moved through the space, what would I want them to meet first? What follows what? How does the body of work unfold?

What I’m really talking about, I suppose, is curation — and the artist’s own role within it.

And there you go. That’s the blog.

If the paragraphs still merge after the TextEdit step, just click at the end of each paragraph in Wix and press Return twice — there are nine paragraphs in total.