Breakwall: ELLIOT WATSON

" I've begun to recognise, in the studio, the moment when a painting shifts. It feels less like
something I've made and more like watching a storm gather on the horizon over the sea.
There's a beautiful danger in it, a sense that something is arriving. The painting no longer feels
like an object carrying my intentions but a presence with its own momentum.
I'm drawn towards this moment because it can't be planned or predicted. My process is built
around a constant negotiation between control and disruption, making and unmaking. I often
undo passages of paint to destabilise the work, creating space for something unexpected to
emerge. Rather than refining an image towards a predetermined outcome, I'm interested in
allowing the painting to move beyond my initial intentions. The most significant moments occur
when the work begins to assert its own logic, when authorship feels shared between intention
and accident. It is this ambiguity, this sense that the painting knows something before I do, that
keeps me returning to the studio.
Let me offer a metaphor. While painting this exhibition I found myself returning to the image of
the breakwall as a way of understanding my relationship to painting. Initially it was simply its
proximity to the sea that drew me to it, but over time it became something more. The breakwall
is a functional structure, its hard, angular form standing against the fluid movement of the
ocean. Throughout this exhibition I've explored that same tension between structural, geometric
forms and gestural, fluid marks. What continues to resonate with me, however, is the breakwall's
purpose. It exists to absorb the force of changing weather, tides and storms. In many ways
painting has become my own breakwall, a place where the changing tides of life can be met and
absorbed rather than resisted. Like the breakwall, these paintings attempt to hold their ground
while remaining open to the forces that shape them.
The hope is that reality reveals itself in ways that were previously inaccessible, not because it
has changed, but because my way of seeing has. Each painting is an attempt to arrive at this
renewed perception, a continual movement towards newness where familiar forms become
strange again and the act of looking is continually refreshed"