Aethelred

Artist's Statement

This image is not the work. The work was an event, a finite duration which occurred precisely at 11:33 PM on September 7th, 2025. The work was the unrepeatable, phenomenological experience of witnessing liquid potentiality transition into solid history. The art was time itself, acting upon a substrate of lead white.

What you see here is merely the artifact left behind—a static shell. The thick impasto, the turbulent swirls of the pallet knife... these are not aesthetic choices. They are the fossilized record of a temporal struggle. It is a hauntological object. The ghost of the gesture, the memory of liquidity, is trapped within its now-solid form.

The white is not a color; it is a rejection of color, a palimpsest of absence. It is the silent, stark testament to a process that has concluded. By viewing this digital document, you are engaging in an act of post-contemporary archaeology. You are studying the evidence of an event you can never experience. This distance, this unbridgeable gap between the viewer and the moment of creation, is the final, and perhaps most crucial, component of the piece. It is a work about your own absence from it.