An artist’s statement is a short piece of writing about your work.
Artist’s statements are as varied and diverse as the art they describe. The following guidelines are suggestions and observations rather than hard-and-fast rules.
Artist statements act as an introduction to your practice as a whole. Your statement should highlight common concerns, motivations and processes running through your work. A longer statement may go into more detail about specific works.
A good statement provides understanding of where your practice and interests come from. It might mention influences on you or your work and support the reader in interpreting what you do.
What are artist’s statements for?
You will need an artist statement for
- most applications for opportunities
- Press releases
- websites
- introducing your practice to galleries and curators
Writing a statement also helps focus and order your thoughts about your practice. Writing a statement can help you talk about your work also.
Watch this Prezi produced by artist and academic Edwina Fitzpatrick on writing about your work. This was originally produced for the Source project.
How long should an artist’s statement be?
The length of your artist’s statement will depend on what you are using it for.
It is a good idea to have a basic artists statement that you can adapt. This could be straight forward paragraph of about 100 – 200 words.
You can grow or shrink this as necessary for different situations.
What makes a good artist’s statement?
The following qualities make for a good artist statement
- Write in the third person (“Janes work” not “My work”)
- Be clear. Use as plain English as much as possible. If you are dealing with specialist concepts explain them briefly. Don’t use complex or niche language for the sake of it.
- Accuracy: don’t dress your work up to be something that it’s not. An accurate statement about work dealing with simple idea is better than faking complexity with hyperbole.
- Say what you see: it can be helpful to refer to physical qualities of your work in reference to the conceptual ones. Explain the decisions that you made about how the work took shape and why you made them.
- Stick to your subject, which is your practice. The purpose of the artist statement is to talk in a focused way about your practice. It’s not a space for wider philosophical debate about the nature of art.
- Objectivity: use of superlatives and grand claims when describing work do no favours. Use objective language when describing your own work.
If curators or critics have written about your work, you may want to include quotes from them in your statement,
What to include in an artist’s statement?
Here are some questions to consider addressing:
- What media do you work with? What interests you about work of this type?
- Why do you work in this media? Is there a relationship between the media and the ideas that you work with?
- What themes, ideas and concerns does your work consider?
- What processes do you use in making the work? how are they relevant to the ideas you are dealing with?
- Are there wider influences and ideas, from outside the arts, which have bearing on your work?
- What ties your individual pieces of work together into a practice?
- Are there particular theories, artists or schools of thought relevant to your work?
- Is there an ‘intention’ behind the work; what do you want the work to achieve?
Things you should not include in an artist statement include:
- Information about your career as an artist
- Exhibition history
- Work history
These things are better covered in an artist’s biography or CV
Remember to revisit and rewrite your statement every so often. Your practice will change over time. So should your artist’s statement.
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