Quieting comprises a watercolour painting on paper and a moving image with sound, presented as two states of a single work.
The work emerges from a system developed through repeated translation between painting and artificial intelligence. Rather than amplifying complexity or spectacle, the process moves toward reduction — using the artificial to intensify the experience of the real, and to create the conditions for a shared perceptual state.
It begins with a single hand-painted watercolour on paper. Chosen for its simplicity and material sensitivity, watercolour allows pigment to move in response to water, gravity, and time, forming an unstable field. This establishes an underlying structure — its density, behaviour, and internal logic — which remains active as the work unfolds.
Artificial intelligence does not generate images independently, but responds to the material conditions of the painting — density, edge, and mark — continuing the gesture within a different system. The initial image carries both organic and non-organic signals, allowing the AI to register gradients, transparencies, and linear structures. The process is iterative, with each stage selected, edited, and refined in relation to the original painting.
The work passes through states of descent, absorption, ignition, expansion, compression, and dissolution — shifting conditions rather than fixed forms. Subtle traces of natural phenomena — fire, rain, ocean — emerge and recede, not as representations but as perceptual echoes. Sound operates alongside the image, shaping attention without stabilising it.
As the work moves between painting, AI, and video, the material form changes. What persists is a shared perceptual condition — emerging through attention rather than contained within the work. Presented together, the painting and moving image allow the viewer to register how perception shifts through translation.
The work remains perceptually open, where forms suggest recognition but do not resolve. Attention is held rather than directed, allowing experience to settle and quieten. In moving between the painting and the video, the viewer is invited to form connections at the level of feeling. The work ends not in the artwork, but in the viewer’s experience. It is designed to survive translation.
