I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.
That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.
The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.
The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay
The Architecture of Restriction
In the traditional studio, rules function as a form of architectural order. They regulate the margin, the edition, the depth of line, and the cleanliness of the surface. Often, these standards restrict the artist before they even begin, crushing the scintillation of the original idea at the edges of the plate in a rush to produce a "finished picture". These standards claim to be neutral, but they rest on a shaky assumption: that the artist, the institution, and the world occupy the same synchronized present. They do not.
The Language of the Apogee
In my own studio, I work with salvaged Perspex, exploring the interaction between perception, action, and material. Printing free from historical rules—ignoring whether a plate is perfectly straight or beveled—forces me to see the work differently every time. I have stopped chasing the “perfect edition,” which is often just a static, dead image. Instead, my focus has shifted to the sovereign space of the print itself—the territory where experimentation, friction, and discovery happen.
Through this practice, I have observed a perceptual interval:
(The Sovereign Delay: the interval between perception and action).
By the time perception becomes action, the moment has already shifted. The artist does not inhabit institutional time; they inhabit this interval. While galleries, museums, and schools operate on coordinated schedules, the studio—both historically and today—is a temporal outlier. This delay is where true influence occurs.
The Studio as Sovereign Jurisdiction
At Two Dogs Art Space, I treat the studio as a laboratory for independence. I do not work according to rules imposed from outside. I negotiate with materials, perception, resistance, and time, tracing the friction that makes the work my own. Praxis is not compliance; it is negotiation. To impose institutional criteria too early collapses the delay and stifles discovery. Without delay, there is no risk; without risk, there is no innovation.
Material as Data: Witnessing Delay
Across printmaking, painting, drawing, or performance, the medium records the delay. The tool acts as a seismograph, capturing friction and resistance:
Printmaking: Using salvaged Perspex introduces a field of prior events—scratches, marks, and resistance. The burr is the crystallization of delay; plate tone is atmospheric evidence. Cleaning the plate into uniform compliance erases the trace of negotiation that gives the work its origin.
Painting & Drawing: Each stroke records a staggered response. To paint or draw all the way to the edges just to complete a “picture” often suffocates the scintillation. In drawing the landscape, I map the friction of my own nervous system, not the yard.
Innovation and the Right to Opacity
Innovation cannot occur where outcomes must be legible in advance. It requires opacity—a protected interval where the work is not yet synchronized with institutional time. I defend that interval. Engagement with the institution may follow, but it must follow sovereignty, not precede it.
Art does not emerge from the clock. It emerges from the perceptual structure between eye and hand. When the needle enters the Perspex, I am not following a manual—I am tracing delay and asserting jurisdiction over time itself. In that interval—between perception and action—the artist must remain free.
