Artist Statements Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody stands in front of a painting, reads three hundred words about liminality, the interrogation of boundaries and the negotiation of memory and space, and learns nothing they could not have guessed. The artist is not being pretentious. They are doing what the form appears to require, and what it appears to require is the reason almost nobody reads these.

We edit artist statements and the writing around them — short and long statements for applications, exhibitions and websites, project and series statements, biographies and CVs for artists, proposal and residency texts, wall text and catalogue entries by the artist, and the covering material that accompanies a submission. Our editors work on a form that has taught everyone to write badly.

The artist statement lives or dies on whether it says what the work does, and its failure is a paragraph of abstraction with no object in it. A reader who cannot picture the work has not been told anything about it. We work through these so the statement begins with what a viewer would physically encounter — the material, the scale, the process, what happens in front of it — since concrete facts earn the right to an idea and abstraction on its own is refused; so the process is described where it is unusual, because how a thing was made is genuinely interesting and is the part artists most often assume is boring; so the words that appear in thousands of statements are replaced with what this artist specifically means, given that "explores", "interrogates" and "negotiates" have been emptied out and now signal only that a statement is being written; so any theoretical frame is introduced after the work rather than before it, as a reader who has seen the object will follow the idea and one who has not will stop; so the statement is honest about what the artist does not know or has not resolved, since that is more interesting than a claim of intention; so the length is fitted to the use, with a fifty-word version that survives being pasted into a form; so the first sentence would make sense read aloud; and so nothing in it could be said about anybody else's work. Statements written this way get read to the end.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished work, applications and images. We are editors rather than artists, curators or assessors, and we offer no view on the work, its meaning or its merit. What we can do is make the statement describe something.