One Horse Landed
One Horse Landed is a body of work born out of its title. Using a machine-generated collection of words as a starting point, I embarked on an exploration of its artistic possibilities. My own expansive archive of photographic images was combined with familiar, gritty textures pulled from Xerox art and a vast body of found imagery. This amalgamation of sources was fed into various AI image models and used to create a collection of artworks from which, over time, a book emerged.
While the narrative thread underpinning One Horse Landed begins with horses, it quickly disentangles itself from the tangible matter of the real world. Equine forms devolve, horse and rider metamorphosing into what might be alien life forms.A piebald pattern kaleidoscopes outwards like the dappled light left imprinted inside the eyelids after looking too long at the sun. Fragments of parts from industrial machinery seem to rise up from the darkness, exposing broken cables, swathes of fabric and piled foam in a surreal underground world. Slowly, this cast of unfamiliar figures becomes one with its new terrain, each shadowy form cloaked in an unstable atmosphere.
Within this otherworldly landscape, the viewer finds themselves not only challenging their perception of familiar forms, but also delving into the realm of a speculative future. Human nature compels us to cling to the recognisable. It is the tension that comes from this searching that spotlights my true subject: the complex choreography between the human imagination and machine interference.
All too often, the vast and unpredictable possibilities of AI and machine abstraction are presented as a dark and unavoidable end-time for art as we know it. In my work, collaboration between artist and AI is instead re-contextualised as a vehicle for wonder, wit and surrealism – a tool with which to interrogate the boundaries of artistic expression. By blurring the line which divides the artificial from the authentic, I gesture towards a possible future of more divergent thinking. And, to AI as a means by which to access it.