FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BOOKMARKS
Paintings that Measure Reading, Time and Attention
In an era dominated by speed, distraction and infinite digital content, Bookmarks proposes a radically slower form of painting. This new body of work transforms the humble act of reading into an extended performative practice, where the completion of a painting is determined not by aesthetic decisions alone, but by the sustained commitment of reading a book.
Each canvas functions simultaneously as painting, document, archive and bookmark. Rather than depicting the contents of a book, the work records the physical progression through it. Every page completed is meticulously painted onto the canvas as a sequential number, gradually occupying its surface until no space remains. The title of the book and its publishing details occupy the upper edge of each work, anchoring the painting to a specific text while refusing any visual illustration of its narrative. The resulting image becomes an index of attention rather than representation.
The series positions painting as a temporal medium. Traditionally understood as the residue of looking, these works instead emerge from sustained acts of reading. Their production is inseparable from duration; each mark corresponds directly to lived time, concentration and intellectual engagement. Completion is therefore contingent upon finishing the book itself. Reading ceases to only be be preparatory research for artistic production and instead also becomes the production.
Occupying a space between conceptual art, systems-based practice and process painting, Bookmarks extends traditions established by artists who have privileged procedure over image, documentation over representation and duration over spectacle. The paintings operate according to a self-imposed methodology in which every page number functions as both a unit of measurement and a painted mark. The work resists expressive gesture while simultaneously becoming deeply autobiographical, recording the artist's encounters with literature through an accumulation of repetitive acts.
Visually, the paintings oscillate between abstraction and information. Dense fields of hand-painted numerals produce rhythmic surfaces that can be read as minimalist compositions, yet every mark remains tied to an external event—the completion of another page. The works possess an aesthetic economy in which typography, spacing, repetition and accumulation replace conventional painterly illusion. From a distance they resemble geometric abstractions; upon closer inspection they reveal themselves as meticulous records of intellectual labour.
The project also interrogates the status of the book as object. Rather than acting as passive support for knowledge, each publication becomes the generator of an independent artwork. The painting functions as an external memory system—an artefact that silently witnesses every page turned. In this sense, the canvas performs the role traditionally assigned to the bookmark, extending a temporary object into a permanent monument of reading.
Theoretical questions surrounding indexicality, authorship and documentation underpin the series. These paintings are less concerned with illustrating literary meaning than with materialising the invisible activity of reading itself. They ask whether knowledge can be represented through evidence of attention rather than through images, and whether the accumulated traces of disciplined engagement possess an aesthetic value of their own.
Ultimately, Bookmarks proposes that contemporary painting can function as an instrument of measurement. It records not only pages read but hours lived, habits formed and ideas encountered. Every completed canvas represents a book, finished or not, yet equally embodies the time required to inhabit it. The works become portraits of endurance, meditations on learning and quiet celebrations of sustained concentration within an increasingly accelerated culture.