Fragile Distributed Form
My art practice is informed by distributed form, both as an organising condition and as a way of understanding how things come into being.
My early work, made before social media, engaged with the internet as a distributed network and as a site of participation in online communities of artists, hackers, and thinkers. I translated aspects of its digital architecture and participatory ethos into works that existed outside the screen. In doing so, I developed rituals and what I called fragile protocols: images and concepts that re-situated distributed form away from the instrumental logic of capitalist systems and towards more poetic possibilities. Fragile protocols offered just enough of a container for others to participate.
In recent years, my work has turned to broader strategies of resistance to the increasingly rationalised systems that infiltrate our being. I work with alchemy, the imaginal realm, and the Matrixial sphere to imagine pre-organisational forms that hold just enough shape and relationality to become meaningful. These web-like forms emerge through the mutual attunement of the elements involved, without requiring external or one-sided protocols. They arise not from chaos or undifferentiated oneness, but from existing difference.
Within this framework, a painting is less a discrete object than a moment of appearance within a wider field of psychic and material activity. I approach fragile distributed form as a way of understanding how images, perceptions, psyches, and events take temporary shape across time, space, and encounter.
A question that continues to orient the work is where an artwork exists under these conditions. If the experiences of making and receiving a work are distributed across time and place, then the work cannot be located in a single object or moment. I have come to think of artworks as constellations: fragments of paint, text, ritual, and memory encountering other fragments across time and place. Individual works function as fragments, and are themselves comprised of fragments. Once an artwork enters the world, it takes on another life, meets new fragments, and lets others fade.
Painting becomes a way of working within these conditions of appearance. Rather than beginning from a fixed intention, the process involves entering a field in which forms gradually emerge. Images arrive, recede, and transform; recognition may be immediate or delayed. What appears is not entirely produced, but encountered and worked with.
More recently, I have become interested in imagining the psyche as a fragile distributed form. In this sense, the psyche appears less as a contained entity than as something that unfolds through relations with others, environments, and images. The imaginal is not treated as subjective projection, but as a domain in which images and archetypes possess their own coherence and agency, shaping experience as much as they are shaped by it.
Within this framework, a viewer encounters not a complete work but a fragment within an unfolding constellation; the work, in turn, encounters not a complete viewer but a fragment within another unfolding constellation. Encounter becomes a process of orientation, in which recognition develops through intimacy and over time. Painting offers a site in which psychic, material, and imaginal realities become momentarily knowable.