Repeatedly Painting,
                                    Scraping Back.

A painter and sculptor based in London and Folkestone, I explore the rift between art and science. I attempt to bridge the divide by demonstrating the similarities in their methods of production, and exploring what each field could learn from the other, while also tackling concepts of conventional beauty, objecthood, and transformation.

I struggle to see the publicly assumed differences in how the practices of art and science function, believing they are fundamentally analogous. My practice therefore attempts to demonstrate these similarities, specifically in the processes applied in both theory generation and artwork generation, bringing the process of idea refinement though repeated constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing into painting.

I also explore the concept of a universal objective beauty - an inquiry in response to the supposed crudity of my past work. I tackle this autobiographically, painting a personal scene - a seascape that I believe to have the best chance at objectivity in its beauty, although this is informed by my personal history; living with this view for most of my life. This situates myself as the artist, a practice I maintain should be carried out in scientific fields to tackle epistemological concerns about inobjective truths, after Donna Haraway’s 1988 Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Priviledge of Partial Perspective.


Playfulness is another aspect of my work that takes from proposed improvements of scientists. After reading works of physicists Hideki Yukawa and David Bohm & F. David Peat, who explored how the sciences could be improved by taking cues from the arts - specifically the freedom of creativity in art due to artists’ playfulness - I realised the strict regulation of my processes was stifling my creativity and I would benefit from a greater sense of play. This manifests within my later work as a freedom of colour and form, and less fixation on precision.
Joseph Ewbank

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