An artist statement is a general introduction to your body of work. The main purpose is simply to prepare the reader on how to approach your work.
It is a quick way to get people familiar with your work, know what you’re doing and why. It doesn’t have to specific about the individual content of each piece but should focus on the overall body of your ywork.
It should give some general description of your goals, intentions, process, and explanations of why you’re doing what you’re doing and what you hope to achieve.
Artist statements are valuable because they also teach you how to create a point of access for your work. A lot can be demonstatrated also with a visual language, featuring images, video or audio in addition to text.
Great practices when starting to write your artist statement include;
- Have some conversations about the work with someone to help you clarify your ideas.
- Ask yourself What are you trying to say in the work?, What influences my work?, How do my methods of working (techniques, style, formal decisions) support the content of my work?, What are specific examples of this in my work, Does this statement bring to mind any images?
- Use an editable document so that you can make changes and update it often. You should keep older copies so that you can refer to them if you should need to write or talk about your older work in retrospective.
- Try to capture your own, specific, unique, artistic voice
Writing an artist statement is an opportunity to help yourself understand what you’re doing with your work, what it’s about, why you’re doing it, what the main underlying mechanism driving the work might be, where it can go and what function it can serve.
