Peter Davidson - eye tracking winter self portrait in delay
The Space of Delay: Seeing Beyond Memory
I am an artist exploring perception, memory, and delay. This writing reflects my observations and creative research, not medical advice or clinical guidance.
I study what I call delay—not as time passing, but as a space between what the eye perceives and the marks I place on the canvas. In this space, perception reorganizes itself before it becomes form. My Davidson Hypothesis suggests that art emerges from this interval, not from immediacy.
Two Dogs Art Space in Akashi has been an important painting and drawing research centre for this idea. Though we share the same yard, we do not share the same perceptual space. Each of us sees, processes, and responds differently. The art that emerges reflects this spatial, perceptual gap.
Through Two Dogs and the NAPAT Foundation Instagram, I encountered research connecting art, perception, and Alzheimer’s. Articles like this one show that aesthetic engagement can support neural circuits, emotion, and meaning-making even when memory is affected. This resonated with my studio observations: perception has its own intelligence, sometimes independent of memory.
The eye itself is active, not passive. It filters, prioritizes, and interprets information before it reaches conscious awareness. It “decides” what matters—contrast, motion, relevance—before my hand ever responds. Scientific research describes how vision and neural systems operate, but rarely addresses the space between perception and expression. In the studio, that space is where everything happens.
Alzheimer’s entered my thinking as a perceptual question. If seeing can remain active even when memory falters, perception itself carries intelligence. Art makes that visible: it traces the space between what we see and how we act.
At Two Dogs Art Space, this interval is alive. Art is not a record of the world—it is a record of how perception becomes doing.
Delay is not time lost—it is the space where perception becomes form.
