My Algorithm

This is about my algorithm, and how it finds its way into the work.

When I draw on paper, I roll it out across the floor. And there's a kinship between that action and scrolling — the unrolling of a sheet and the endless unrolling of a feed. A day's accumulation of images on social media can shape what I make that day. Over recent months, much of my painting has been formed by images of the genocide that is happening now. I have to be conscious of that. There are so many strong artists working with the present moment as material, folding what's happening into what they make.

My work has always reflected me: the time I'm living through, what's happening around me, socially and politically. For a long time my practice was about myself and my past — things I needed to process. This new body of work is different. It's about being acted upon, constantly, daily. The feed itself is largely what's happening in the world. But beneath it, the comments are the work of right-wing bot farms — a relentless, pathetic stream of vileness designed to wear you down.

So my paintings now are of destruction. Places that have been bombed. Villages. Peoples.

White does a lot of the work. The main figures occupy the centre of the frame, yet they've been all but whitewashed out — in the way we whitewash history, in the way stories are whitewashed online, where everything is taken away and the narrative is curated for you. In my paintings I've removed the protagonists. I want the viewer to look at what remains and ask: what is in there? Why has it been done? Is it being done to me? Because when you look at a picture, what are you actually looking at? Only what someone has chosen to show you. It's curated, again.

Which is why the work ends up political, whether I intend it or not. If the feed curates what I see, and the comments beneath it try to tell me how to feel about it, then a painting that removes the protagonist and leaves only the aftermath is my way of handing the looking back to the viewer. Though I'm aware that's a curation too — I've simply chosen what to take out rather than what to put in. Perhaps that's the honest position: to make the curation visible rather than pretend there isn't one. And in this moment, not holding an opinion is also a choice; it's one you've already made. So where do you stand? What are your views?