Venice Biennale 2024
In late 2023, artist and curator Daniel Ibbotson invited me to make work for the Venice Biennale. He asked me for two pieces and would choose one of them to show alongside a wider group of artists through the Proseed Collective. Of course I said yes.
Daniel started Proseed during the pandemic so that local artists could keep showing work. He had shown solo in Venice at the 2022 Biennale, and for 2024 he wanted something bigger: a group presentation under the Proseed Collective – Venice 24 banner, in association with the European Cultural Centre (ECC).
Around forty artists were asked for 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.
Things shifted after I watched Coded Bias, a documentary about surveillance and the algorithms that shape daily life. I work with software and understand the tools the film describes. I could see how these systems help decide who is treated as belonging, and who is marked out as a “foreigner”.
Then came 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 be about power (who gets to decide who belongs) and automation (technology standing in for human judgement).
Early research took me to the Scottish National Gallery, where I spent time with pre-Renaissance painting, looking at how it shows status and belief through materials as well as images. That led me to learn gilding, because gold leaf was used to signal value and authority.
Today a lot of the sorting of people starts with their faces, and facial recognition is cheap and widely available.
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.
In the end, 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 taking in what it means to be part of it. The Biennale is huge and complicated, with a long and contested history.
It’s an honour to have had work there, and I’m grateful to everyone who made it happen.
