Artist statement examples

I paint interiors at the hour when the light is about to go. Rooms with someone just out of frame — a chair pushed back, a cup still in the wrong place. I work in oil on linen, thinly, so the ground keeps showing through and nothing looks settled. I started painting empty rooms after clearing out my grandmother's flat, and I have not really stopped since. The work is about the residue people leave in a space: what a room remembers. Recent paintings are [size] and slower than they used to be. I paint from memory rather than from photographs, which is why the perspective is always slightly wrong.

Use this length on your own site, where there is room for one specific detail about how you work.

I photograph the edges of towns — the retail parks, the last bus stop, the field that has been for sale for nine years. Medium format, colour negative, always in flat light. These are the most-seen and least-looked-at places in the country. I am interested in what gets built when nobody is really deciding anything: the accidental architecture of a ring road. I work one location at a time, over several visits, because the first picture of a place is always the obvious one. Prints are [size] in editions of [number].

Use this when your subject is a place and the reader has never thought about it.

I make pots for daily use — bowls, cups, jugs — thrown in stoneware and fired to [temperature] in a gas kiln. The glazes are mine, developed over [number] years, and they do different things depending on where a piece sits in the kiln. I like that I do not fully control it. A cup that comes out unlike its neighbour is the point rather than the fault. I make things to be used hard and washed often. If a pot is too precious to take to work, I have made it wrong.

Use this if you make functional work and want to say so without apologising for it.

I work in welded steel and salvaged timber, mostly at a scale you walk around rather than look at. The material arrives with a history — barn beams, scaffolding, somebody's gate. I leave the evidence of it: old fixing holes, paint, the bend something took years ago. Then I cut and join until it holds a new shape without pretending the old one never happened. The work is about repair, and about what honest repair looks like. Not restoration. You should be able to see the seam.

Use this when the material itself carries the meaning and you want that stated plainly.

I make reduction linocuts in [number] layers, printed by hand on [paper]. Reduction printing destroys the block as it goes: each colour is cut away from the same surface, so by the last layer there is nothing left to print from again. The edition is the only edition there will ever be. That deadline is the reason I use it. The images are of working landscapes — quarries, allotments, flood defences. Places shaped by use rather than by design.

Use this where the process has a real constraint in it. A constraint is more interesting than an intention.

I weave on a [number]-shaft floor loom in undyed wool and linen, in a palette that comes from the fleece rather than the dye pot. I am interested in cloth as a record of time — how long a piece takes, and how the tension in my hands changes across a day at the loom. You can read a bad afternoon in the selvedge. Pieces are [size], made to be hung or used. I sell the flawed ones as well, and I say which they are.

Use this when time is part of what you are selling, which in weaving it usually is.

I work with found paper — receipts, ledgers, letters bought by the box at house clearances — layered with gouache and wax until the writing is only half legible. The source material is other people's record-keeping, most of it about money. What survives is the handwriting and the arithmetic, which turns out to be more intimate than a diary. I do not use anything I cannot say the origin of. Every piece lists its sources on the back, and I do not buy from a dealer who cannot say where a box came from.

Use this when your materials came from somewhere and the provenance is part of the work.

I draw for editorial and publishing — ink and digital colour, always figurative, usually people doing something slightly wrong. The ink is done on paper and scanned, because a brush line still does something a stylus does not. I get commissioned when a piece needs a joke that does not undercut it. I read the article first and the brief second, which occasionally causes trouble. Recent clients include [names]. I take [number] commissions a month and I answer within a day, including when the answer is no.

Use this if you work to commission. Commissioners are reading for whether you are easy to work with.

I paint large-scale exterior murals in [paint], designed for the wall they are on rather than adapted to fit it. Before I design anything I spend a day at the site watching who actually goes past — what time, on foot or in a car, from which direction. A mural read at forty miles an hour is a different object from one read from a bus stop. I work with [councils, building owners, community groups], and the people who will live with the wall are involved in the design. It takes longer and it lasts.

Use this when the client is a council, a developer or a community group rather than a collector.

I make jewellery in recycled silver and reclaimed stones, fabricated by hand. No casting, no CAD. Most of the stones come out of inherited pieces that nobody wears any more. I reset them so they get worn again. That is most of what I do, and it is harder than it sounds: you are working to somebody's memory and a fixed stone size at the same time. Commissions take [number] weeks, and I show the work in progress throughout. Stones are reset rather than glued, and the old setting comes back to you.

Use this where trust is the barrier — people are handing you something irreplaceable.

Oil on linen, painted from memory rather than from photographs. Interiors at the hour the light goes, with someone just out of frame. The perspective is always slightly wrong, and deliberately so — this is a room as you remember it, not a room as you stand in it.

Use this beside the work. At this length, cut every word that is about you and keep the ones about the picture.

Medium-format colour photographs of the edges of towns: retail parks, last bus stops, fields that have been for sale for nine years. Places photographed constantly and looked at almost never. One location at a time, over several visits, because the first picture of a place is the obvious one.

Use this where a form gives you a box and a word limit. Lead with the subject, not the intention.

Functional stoneware, thrown and glazed in [town]. Made to be used hard and washed often. The glazes do different things depending on where a pot sits in the kiln, and I like that I do not fully control it. Everything is food-safe and made to go in the dishwasher.

Use this where someone is holding the work already and only needs to know what it is and where it came from.

Welded steel and salvaged timber at walk-around scale. The material keeps its history — old fixing holes, paint, the bend it took years ago. The work is about repair rather than restoration. You should be able to see the seam.

Use this when the material history is visible in the object and the label just has to point at it.

I paint domestic interiors at dusk, in oil on linen at [size]. The rooms are empty of people but recently occupied: a chair pushed back from a table, a cup left in the wrong place. I paint from memory rather than from photographs, which produces a perspective that is consistently and deliberately slightly wrong. The work began after I cleared my grandmother's flat in [year]. What struck me was not her absence but the evidence of ordinary habit — the worn patch on one arm of a chair, a light left on in a room nobody used. I have been painting that residue since. Technically I am interested in thinness. I work in successive transparent layers so the ground stays visible, which stops the image settling into something finished. A room that looks resolved is a room nobody lives in. Over [number] years the paintings have become slower and smaller. Early work was large and quick; a current piece takes [number] weeks and is closer to the scale of the things it depicts. The work is made in a [size] studio in [town], where I paint [number] days a week alongside [teaching, a job, caring responsibilities]. That constraint is the reason this request is for time rather than for materials. This award would fund [studio time, materials, a specific body of work]. Concretely, it would let me [the outcome], which I cannot do at present because [the honest constraint]. Recent exhibitions include [venue, year] and [venue, year]. Work is held in [collections]. I am represented by [gallery] — or, if you are not: I work independently and sell directly from the studio.

Use this shape for funding. Note that the last two paragraphs are about the money and the evidence, not the work — most rejected applications leave them out.

My practice is a long-form photographic survey of [region]'s edgelands — the retail parks, service roads and unadopted land between the last houses and open country. I shoot medium format on colour negative, in flat light, returning to each location over [number] visits across a year. The project started because these are the most-seen and least-looked-at places in the country. They are where a great many people actually spend their time, and they are almost entirely absent from how the area pictures itself. Nothing there was designed; it accumulated. I am trying to photograph accumulation. Method matters to the work. I do not shoot on a first visit. The first photograph of any place is the one the place is already telling you to take, and it is usually about atmosphere. By the fourth or fifth visit the obvious picture is exhausted and something more specific becomes visible, which is nearly always a detail of use: a desire path, a repaired fence, where people really park. I am applying now because the survey has reached the point where it needs a fixed period of concentrated work rather than weekends. I have [number] usable frames and no edit, and the edit is the part that cannot be done an hour at a time. During this residency I would [extend the survey to X, work with the archive at Y, produce a body of Z prints]. Your [darkroom, archive, location, community links] is directly relevant because [reason]. The output would be [number] finished prints at [size], plus [a book, an exhibition, a talk]. Earlier work from this project was shown at [venue, year] and published in [publication, year].

Use this when you are applying to a specific place. The paragraph naming their resource is the one that decides it.