Studio Journal
Volume I – What Remains
Studio Essay 

Remaining With What Changes

I had stopped asking what the flower represented.
Instead, I had begun asking what it was teaching me about attention.

Studio Fragment
tussen / in – Diptych
What Remains – 2026

Remaining With What Changes

There are moments in the studio when very little appears to happen.

A flower rests on the table. Light shifts slowly across the linen. Paint dries almost imperceptibly. A line is drawn, erased and drawn again. Hours pass without anything that could reasonably be called progress.

For a long time I believed these were the quiet moments between making.

I have gradually come to understand that they are the practice. That what they were practising, I now think, was not only a way of painting but a way of being formed by the act of looking.

The paintings that emerged for What Remains did not begin with an image I wanted to produce, nor with a concept that required illustration. They began with the repeated act of remaining with ordinary encounters long enough for them to become something else.

The flowers that entered the studio were never intended as symbols. They arrived because they were close at hand. Some were gathered during walks. Others had already begun fading. Occasionally one would remain on the table for days as its colour softened, its petals curled and its form slowly dissolved into something quieter than bloom.

I realised, almost without noticing when it had happened, that I had stopped asking what the flower represented. Instead, I had begun asking what it was teaching me about attention. That shift changed the work. It also changed me.

Only much later, while returning to John Berger’s writing, did I recognise a similar movement. Berger reminds us that seeing precedes words, suggesting that our first relationship with the world is established through attentive perception before it is organised through language (Berger, 2008). I did not encounter this idea as an explanation of my own practice. I encountered it as recognition. The paintings had already begun teaching me that careful looking is not a preliminary stage before making. It is already part of making.

The studio gradually became a place where looking itself required discipline. not the discipline of efficiency, but the discipline of remaining.

As this way of working deepened, I found that attention could no longer be separated from the body that practised it. Looking was never detached observation. It involved kneeling to collect a fallen petal, moving closer to notice a stain in raw linen, waiting for paint to settle before deciding whether another mark was necessary. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a language for understanding this embodied relationship with the world, describing perception not as distant observation but as our lived participation within it (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Again, I recognised a companion rather than a source. The studio had already begun teaching the lesson.

The paintings challenged another assumption I had carried for years: that making consisted of applying ideas to materials. The work refused that description. Paper tore unexpectedly. Linen absorbed pigment differently from one day to the next. Graphite resisted certain surfaces while becoming almost weightless on others. Stitching altered compositions I had considered resolved. Nothing remained a passive recipient of intention.

Tim Ingold’s writing on making as correspondence helped me understand why this mattered. Rather than viewing materials as inert substances awaiting form, Ingold describes making as an ongoing correspondence between maker and material in which understanding emerges through engagement itself (Ingold, 2013). That idea resonated deeply with my experience in the studio. Yet I found myself wanting to extend the conversation. What interested me was not only that materials correspond with the maker, but that sustained attention to those materials gradually transforms the person doing the making.

The work was changing the practitioner. That realisation quietly redirected the practice. Looking, making and material engagement no longer felt like separate activities. They became different expressions of the same attentive relationship.

If the first years of the practice asked how to witness change, more recent work has begun asking what witnessing asks of the witness.

That question first became concrete, rather than abstract, on an afternoon when I nearly threw away a dish of wilted stems that had sat too long on the table. My hand was already reaching for the bin before I stopped myself. The hesitation was small, but it was not nothing: it was the recognition that I had been taking something. attention, time, the flower’s slow disintegration. without asking what, if anything, I owed it in return. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing repeatedly returns to reciprocity as the foundation of our relationship with the living world (Kimmerer, 2020), and reading her work after that afternoon, I understood my own hesitation differently. Attention cannot remain complete in itself. To receive the gift of close observation also invites responsibility. The practice is therefore no longer satisfied with simply documenting impermanence. It asks how artistic attention might become one small act of care within a world marked by continual change.

That care is not expressed through grand gestures. It appears in returning to the same painting rather than abandoning it, in reading a source carefully before citing it, in allowing uncertainty to remain visible instead of resolving it too soon.

Jane Bennett complicates this relationship further, reminding us that matter itself participates in the unfolding of events (Bennett, 2010). Her work challenged my own assumptions about artistic intention. I am not persuaded that materials possess agency in precisely the way Bennett proposes. Yet her writing asks an important question: how much of what we call making belongs solely to the artist? The answer, I suspect, is less than I once imagined. Humidity, gravity, pigment, fibres, drying time and accident all participate in the final work. My interest, however, lies less in distributing agency than in cultivating relationship. The ethical question is therefore not whether materials act, but how sustained correspondence with them changes the person who works alongside them.

Looking back, I have come to understand that the studio has slowly become a place of enquiry rather than production alone. The paintings do not simply communicate ideas. They generate them.

Graeme Sullivan argues that artistic practice is capable of producing knowledge through enquiry undertaken in and through creative work itself (Sullivan, 2021). That proposition resonates strongly with my own experience. Yet the knowledge generated in the studio is not limited to the artwork. Something else is also being formed: the practitioner.

Perhaps this has been the quiet subject of the practice all along. not flowers, not paper, not ecological grief, not even attention, but the gradual formation of a human being through the repeated disciplines of looking, making and remaining.

The paintings record traces of that process. So do the essays. Neither explains the other. Both emerge from the same attentive life.

I do not know where this practice will eventually lead, and I no longer think that uncertainty is something to overcome. If anything, the work has taught me that uncertainty is one of the conditions through which genuine attention becomes possible.

The flowers continue to fade. The linen continues to receive marks. The questions continue changing. For now, that is enough. because I have come to believe that the purpose of practice is not to arrive at certainty. It is to remain with what changes.

Conversation Notes

This essay developed through sustained conversations with John Berger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tim Ingold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jane Bennett and Graeme Sullivan. Their work did not provide conclusions for the essay. Rather, each became a conversation partner whose ideas clarified, challenged or extended questions that had already begun emerging through studio practice. Scholarship is therefore presented here not as authority, but as companionship within an evolving enquiry.

References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berger, J. (2008). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. (Originally published 1972.)

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

Kimmerer, R.W. (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.

Sullivan, G. (2021). Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

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