Can I have your autograph?

Thank you to all the participants who generously shared their time and added their signatures to this collective artwork. Your contributions and engagement are gratefully acknowledged.

During the final week of my residency, I prepared a series of oil-painted canvases—each produced through my machinery-based process—and set them out in the Forrest Hall lobby between 10am and 2pm. I knew from my six weeks inside the community that most scholars were under significant pressure with research deadlines and thesis writing, so I expected it might be difficult to ask for something as personal as an autograph. After James, the Director, kindly signed first and shared the invitation in the group chat, eight participants generously took the time to join.

Although this workshop began from my own curiosity, the conversations that unfolded made it far more than a simple signing activity. Standing together in front of the completed abstract portraits, I was reminded how this unique academic environment—where marine scientists, linguists, bee researchers, artists and oceanographers cross paths daily—creates rare opportunities for meaningful exchange. These dialogues helped me reflect on the central question of my practice: how painting, as an action, captures and crystallises materials that are constantly in flux.

A signature is something a person writes so many times that it becomes almost automatic. That form of learned automation fascinates me. Even though the movement is quick, the writer already knows the entire gesture before the pen touches the surface. It isn’t a series of accumulating moments; it is a single movement shaped by a broader internal timeframe. This sense of duration—a presentness that stretches beyond the immediate moment—resonates with the temporal logic of my own process, where oil paint, machinery, and human intention converge over extended time.

This expanded notion of duration also relates, I think, to an ecological rather than economic view of the world. Economies value speed and accumulation; ecological thinking values long spans, slow adjustments, and interdependence. Many of the researchers I spoke with consider the global and environmental impact of their work—another form of long-duration thinking. Oil painting, despite being old-fashioned and materially inconvenient in the digital age, carries its own slowness, delay, and resistance to immediacy. I believe that this very “delay” still holds relevance today, offering a counterpoint to accelerated production and aligning with the ecological sensibilities that shape contemporary research and society.

Tap/click the thumbnails to view each autograph in full.