Venice Biennale 2024

What do you say when you’re invited to make work for the Venice Biennale?

You say yes.

In late 2023, artist and curator Daniel Ibbotson asked me to make two pieces. He wanted to select one to exhibit alongside a wider group of artists through the Proseed Collective.

Daniel started Proseed during the pandemic, as a way for local artists to keep showing work through a strange and uncertain time. He had exhibited solo in Venice at the 2022 Biennale. For 2024, he set out to make something bigger: a group presentation under the Proseed Collective – Venice 24 banner, in association with the European Cultural Centre (ECC).

The brief was clear. Around forty artists were invited to contribute work at 500 × 500mm, responding to the theme of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia:

Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere.

I don’t usually begin with explicitly social themes, and the title stopped me for weeks.

The shift came after watching Coded Bias, a documentary about surveillance and the algorithms that increasingly shape daily life. I work with software. I understand the tools behind what the film describes. I also recognise how these systems quietly influence who is treated as belonging—and who is marked out as a “foreigner”.

What followed was months of trying new processes. I had a clear sense of what I wanted to make, but not yet a way to make it. I wanted the work to hold two ideas at once: power (who gets to decide who belongs) and automation (the way technology stands in for human judgement).

Early research took me to the Scottish National Gallery. I spent time with pre-Renaissance painting, looking at how status and belief were expressed through materials and depiction. That, in turn, led me to learning gilding—gold leaf as a way to signal value, authority, and attention.

The contemporary parallel was hard to ignore. A lot of today’s categorisation begins with faces. Facial recognition is powerful, widely available, and cheap to deploy.

The two final pieces I submitted were built from portrait photographs I took years ago. I ran them through facial recognition, then plotted the results onto metallic board using a robotic pen plotter. The works were finished by hand with gold and silver leaf.

Ultimately, the silver version stayed in the UK. The gold grid was packed up and delivered to Palazzo Bembo by water taxi for the opening of the exhibition.

I’m still processing what it means to be part of it. The Biennale is a huge, complicated event—historical, contested, and deeply influential.

For me, it’s also very simple: it’s an honour to have work shown there, and I’m grateful to everyone who made this possible.