This work is the result of a performance combining automatic writing, active imagination, and contact improvisation into a continuous, embodied action. Working blindfolded on the canvas, I explored balance, tension, and resolution through a range of gestural mark-making.

Using chalk pastels, acrylic and oil onto a streched canvas with a watercolour underpainting and textured ground, the painting unfolded through spontaneous disruptions involving risk, control, imperfection, and unity. The result is a painting, its documentation - but also a process: a hand-made negotiation between thought and flow, craft and catastrophe, conscious control and the practice of letting go.

Rooted in my ongoing engagement with the Meisner acting technique and automatic drawing, the process privileges attunement over intention, allowing accidental and incidental marks to reveal a kind of truthful structure. My body became absorbed into patterns, the ground into space, the gesture into atmosphere.

While my attention was tuned to Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, I was also aware of making this work at the Royal College of Art - and of the lingering presence of past students, whose spirits seemed to move through the room and into the painting.