Writing a great artist statement can be frustrating and difficult. Being asked to synthesize a body of work into a 2-3 paragraph “statement” is hard because what we’re being asked to do is not a mission statement (ie what we’re going do to change the world) but a statement of our process and why.
The point of an artist statement is to provide a point of entry into understanding the work and how it originated. A bio helps to anchor the art in the artist’s lived experience, but the statement gives the audience a means by which to see the artwork from the philosophical perspective of the artist.
It’s important to say here that a statement is not about future work. Always talk about the work you have in front of you. Never talk about work that you’re going to do or have in mind (this is why it’s not a mission statement).
Here’s an excellent artist statement from Prof. Kristen Letts Kovak on her body of work, Monstrous Sentiments. Note that Prof. Kovak has a specific artist statement for every body of work. In her artist statements, she starts by discussing her experience of Gothic literature (and a fascination for it) and how her ideas were sparked by the experience of reading it. She’s specific about what she thinks is interesting about the characters in this genre of literature because of how they move in the story and what that says about us as a human species.
In the second paragraph, Kovak ties those literary characteristics to her paintings and what she is endeavoring to show you about her own growth after having read Gothic stories. She is providing the audience a window into her thoughts about why she made the work this way and what she hopes you’ll see and consider when you look at it.
Notice that she hasn’t told you about her paint process because that’s irrelevant here. You can already see what the paint is doing and there’s no need to describe its physical nature; she’s already telling you what she’s done with the paint and how it’s describing the shape of her thoughts. She’s not telling you how to feel, but how to think about her work in the context of what she’s told you about what thoughts drove her actions to make the work that she’s showing you.
Prof. Kovak does this again in her older series, White Noise. The concise statement is specific about the work’s relevance to the then-current political climate in the US and how she thinks about it. Kovak’s work is “abstracted” from how she sees reality and even though every viewer will interpret her work differently, an artist statement anchors the work precisely where Kovak wants it to be, which is about how she thinks and feels about US politics.
I know for a fact that, like me, Prof. Kovak has written hundreds of artist statements in her lifetime of making art. It takes some time and effort to get it right— to put your finger squarely on the complexity of thought that generated the work. And then as your work changes so does the artists statement. It’s in constant motion as you zero in on each iteration of your work. Every offshoot, every dead end, every grand series will have its own voice. Write accordingly.
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