Week 1: “Describe a small escape you witnessed.”

Week 2: “Describe somewhere, real or imagined, that you go to escape daily life.”

Week 3: “Describe your mode, style or place of escape when you were young.”

The prompts moved from a small escape witnessed, to somewhere people go to escape daily life, and finally to how they escaped when they were young. This changed the tone of the observations submitted.

Escape began as an event — danger avoided, mood lifted, an animal hidden or released — then opened into places, memories, fiction, landscape, breath and solitude. By week 3 it had become more personal: bedrooms, books, bikes, dens, trees, canals, piano, and the private space of the head.

What stood out was that escape was not always simple freedom. It could be play, retreat, survival, or a way of making space where there was none.

In practical terms, Chapter 2 received 50 observations from 33 people, from which 12 paintings were made. All were divided: one half posted to the selected correspondent, the other retained in The Archive of Selective Memory. Some have arrived; others (as at the end of June) are still in transit.

Each pairing has been photographed and stored with the observation details as a permanent archive of work

Go to the Archive

Across the two chapters, Correspondence has begun to change shape. A group of people is starting to gather around the project, returning to it, adding to it, and allowing their own small acts of witnessing to become part of its structure. So far, 121 observations have been received from 40 people. Chapter 2 was shorter than Chapter 1, but the same number of people responded.

The postal movement of the work has also become part of the meaning: selected paintings have now travelled to nine countries, with 40% of recipients in the UK, reflecting the UK weighting of my social network.

Two paintings from Chapter 1 (Türkiye and South Africa) have been treated as lost —the uncertainty of delivery is integral to the project. Some paintings from Chapter 2 are still in transit.

There is now an interactive Google Map of the postal destinations. Each marker can be opened to show the observation and the recipient’s initials and city.

Show Destinations on Google Maps

The observations in Chapter 1, New Beginnings, showed that beginnings are not always clean or hopeful. They can be small, practical, difficult, fragile, or forced.

Chapter 2, Escape, observations became more interior: books, bikes, dens, trees, fiction, memory, solitude, and the private space of the head. Escape was not always freedom. It was often a way of making space. The posted halves continue to travel, while the retained halves continue to build the archive.

Thank you to D.L in Shoreham-by-Sea, the recipient of Chapter 1, Week 1, Day3, who framed her half and kindly sent me a photo. The painting was made in response to:

“my Garden as winter sheds its clothes so does spring bring forward blossom which Turn to apples every year it’s new again.”

Thank you to everyone who submitted an observation, followed Chapter 2, or received one of the paintings.

Thank you also to those who sent me photos, feedback, thoughts and ideas as the project has developed. Correspondence has always been a distributed work: a growing network of divided paintings, spread across different places, with one half out in the world and one half kept in the archive.

The project will keep adapting as we move forward, and Chapter 3 is now being planned for later in the year

Week 2 Prompt was - Describe somewhere, real or imagined, that offers an escape from daily life.

Day 1: “Walking on the pan in Deadvlei, near Sossosvlei, Namibia.”
Dispatched to: S.E, Laren, Netherlands

Sometimes I make random trips using Google Street View - exploring far-flung places in the world. So now I’m wandering the pan in Deadvlei, Namibia. But rather than simply paint the desert scene, I also painted the mechanism that gave me access to it: the information panel, rating, icons, map inset, navigation marks. The result is a place of escape seen at a distance, already mapped and indexed, then slowed down again through painting.

Day 2: “A good work of fiction”
Dispatched to: A.H, Écully, France

Here, I use pages from one of Simenon’s novels, but not to illustrate the story as such. By removing the page numbers and headings, the text loses its indexed order and becomes a broken surface across the canvas. The redactions make the story impossible to read in a straightforward way. Instead, you have to work through fragments: Emma, a yellow dog, weapons, poison, fear. In that sense, you become a detective, trying to determine the story of a detective novel from damaged clues.

Day 3: “Travelling from Coron to El Nido, (Palawan, Philippines) on a six-day boat expedition exploring vibrant reefs, secluded beaches, and untouched islands, then sharing music around a bonfire with fellow travellers.”
Dispatched to: M. D, Sanremo, Italy

This observation immediately took me back to vivid memories of SCUBA diving on reefs in Barbados and Saint Lucia. Reefs have a particular hold on me: colour, movement, life, and the strange quiet of being suspended below the surface, where the body is released from its normal weight — an escape from gravity as much as from ordinary life.

Day 4: “A gushing sound of water flowing down in the forest river - chirping birds correlating.”
Dispatched to: S.B, Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire, UK

The observation starts with a gushing river, and I wanted that to be felt in the paint. I made the river thick, loose and dragged, almost thundering along the bottom of the image. The forest above is darker and denser, built with vertical strokes, as if holding the sound inside. The sky is much thinner. I scratched small marks into it, borrowing loosely from the idea of a spectrogram, so the bird chirps become signals within the paint rather than painted birds.

Week 1 Prompt was - Describe a small escape you witnessed.

Day 1: “Our neighbor held rabbits, once our cat returned with a squealing baby rabbit in its mouth. We grabbed the cat to open its mouth, and the rabbit could escape home.”
J. G., Sanremo, Italy.

What begins almost as a domestic incident becomes a small life-and-death drama: human intervention, restraint, and escape. I treated the two halves as opposing states: capture and death versus life and escape.

Day 2: “A lady exited a car wishing the death of the driver. He was angry and came out of the car holding a gun. She walked inside a building in front …”
A. M., Verona, Italy

There was a temptation to paint a cinematographic scene: car, woman, man, gun. Instead, I treated the observed incident as a painted diagram with case notes, then extended the unresolved story into the layout of a building, where two other figures become involved. You might wonder: “Was the escape successful?”

Day 3. “Watching a local band at the local pub at the weekend I felt the music lifting my spirits and I instantly escaped from a malaise of low mood.”
C. S., Garstang, UK.

Music, rhythm, and lifted mood come to me as abstraction. I took the opportunity to study Sonia Delaunay’s abstractions, where colour behaves almost like sound: overlapping, clashing, repeating, and carrying movement across the surface.

Day 4. “My tabby-tuxedo tomcat with the pink nose would always hide in his play tunnel so that I could scratch from the outside with a stick that he would catch suddenly, …”
R. M., Hamburg, Germany

When peering into a tunnel, perhaps the only visible thing is a little pink nose: an abstract form when isolated and enlarged. The nostrils become dark tunnels. I wanted the nose to feel almost sculptural, with the cat compressed into the shallow space of the canvas.

Thank you to everybody who sent in observations for week 1. You’re all helping to create this growing network of distributed paintings.

Week 1 prompt: “Describe a small escape you witnessed.”

Each enters the selection pool.
One will be drawn at random each studio day.
One will become a painting.
One correspondent receives the Left-part in the post (at no charge).

Responses for this week are accepted until Wednesday 3 June, 07:00GMT.

How to Participate

A few are undelivered so far in Europe, and South Africa - and I imagine the envelope to Australia is being carried on the back of a camel crossing the steppes of Outer Mongolia.

Such is the nature of postal correspondence, the physical package which travels through vast distances. My paintings, and the observations that generated them, are travelling to places unknown. I love this idea.

Below is the painting pair made on 28 April in response to the observation “Beginning the housework tasks that I’ve been putting off.” I was intrigued by the idea of creating mini-portraits of cleaning equipment on shelves, waiting to be used. In fact, it’s the Left part of this painting which is currently travelling to Australia.

One question I am asked is: why is it always the Left part that is posted out? The answer is simple: it is the part that left the studio.

The Right part enters the archive, where it becomes both painting and record. The image below shows the reverse of each Chapter 1 painting, revealing part of the project’s mechanism.

This raises a question I keep returning to: where is the “art” in this work? Is it the collection of painted sides, or the collection of reverse inscriptions? Is it the individual paintings, or the expanding archive?

And if a painted side reveals itself in the archive, what might this tell us?

As the parts accumulate, the project is revealing itself slowly: not as a set of giveaways, but as a structure of witness, painting, posting, archive and receipt.

Once received, the Left part begins another life beyond the studio, in a place I no longer control.

Starting soon: Chapter 2 - Escape

Escape is not only dramatic. It can be small, ordinary, practical, comic, or barely visible: a refusal, a release, a route around something, a habit interrupted, or a boundary crossed.

The first weekly prompt will be sent to all correspondents on Thursday 28 May.

Your response doesn’t need to be grand. A small witnessed moment is enough: something you noticed, something that stayed with you, something that seemed worth holding for a little longer. Each week, submitted observations enter the random selection process for that week’s paintings.

If you were a correspondent in Chapter 1, you are automatically included in Chapter 2.

If you are not already a correspondent and would like to take part in Chapter 2, the button below will take you to the project page, where you can find out how to join in.

Find Out How to Join In

In total, 42 people submitted 75 observations, and 20 of those observations became paintings. Those 20 works now exist in two places: one half sent out, the other kept in The Archive of Selective Memory.

The collection of Right half paintings is shown in the image above. The Left half paintings have been sent out across the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Türkiye, South Africa and Australia.

If you’ve received one, you’ll know that what arrived doesn’t necessarily feel incomplete. Many of the halves read as resolved paintings in their own right. At the same time, you know that something corresponds to it elsewhere - the corresponding Right part.

Each pairing has been photographed and stored with the observation details in an on-line digital archive at objkt.com.

Most of the observations you sent in didn’t become paintings, but they are still part of the project. The collection you’re seeing is shaped as much by what wasn’t selected as by what was.

There isn’t a clear pattern to participation. Some of you participated in all four weeks, and some participated only once. One of you participated in only two consecutive weeks and was selected twice (which prompted a ‘steward’s enquiry’ into the randomising process). Others submitted several times and were not selected at all. The process doesn’t favour persistence or effort. It simply runs as it is set.

At this point, everything exists in parts. The paintings are split. The observations are either seen or not seen. The complete version of each work exists, but only as a digital record. There isn’t a single place where everything comes together.

Chapter 1 has been about establishing this structure and seeing if it would hold. It does. Chapter 2 will keep the same approach, but push it further through the prompts, through how the paintings are divided, and through how the archive is shown.

Thank you to K. D. in Sanremo, the recipient of the painting made in Week 2, who kindly sent the photo below. The painting was made in response to:

“Planted my first pot of cat grass. With four cats in the building. It might be fun!”

If you’ve received a painting, it’s yours to keep, alter, or use as you wish. If you’d like to share a photo, you’re very welcome to. It would be very interesting to see what happens to it.

Thank you again to all who participated.

Week 4 Prompt was - Describe any beginning you witnessed that felt challenging.

Day 1: “Formation of the new Hungarian government that we are all witnessing seems pretty challenging.”
A. A., Sanremo, Italy.

The redacted social media fragments suggest information arriving as evidence, but the surface becomes unstable and difficult to trust. It starts with the formation of a government, but ends up closer to a field of pressure, distortion, and competing claims.

Day 2: “One of my sons lost his job recently and is now working on finding a new direction.”
A. H., Écully, France.

The work holds a steady cadence of coloured activity blocks, suggesting a system in place. That structure is interrupted and doesn’t recover; what follows thins out into tentative directions that never fully settle, leaving only traces of what was there and uncertainty.

Day 3. “The sun coming up in a blush pink sky, the day after my son was born, Knowing his life was in my hands, brought tears to my eyes.”
D. L., Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex.

The dawn holds for a moment, then thins out across the surface. Colour circulates without a centre, the field staying even as the feeling shifts. A gentle pressure that doesn’t resolve.

Day 4. “Beginning the housework tasks that I’ve been putting off.”
T. S. Perth, Australia.

Small portraits of cleaning equipment, each held in its own compartment. They register individually, but remain fixed within the shelving that holds them in place. The system is complete, but nothing has started.

Day 5. “A minute bird found in town centre in a doorway. No mother around. Taken home by a child, after a few days it disappeared, windows closed! Where did it go?”
R. B., Sanremo, Italy.

Using a child’s drawing language to reflect a child’s way of understanding the situation, I painted only with my non-dominant hand, making marks and writing which keeps the image direct and unrefined. Although deceptively simple, it had its material challenges.

Where did that bird go?

Week 3 Prompt - What UNEXPECTED beginning did you witness this year?

Day 1: “Welcoming two teenagers into Explorer Scouts after they have relocated into the area due to hate crime against their family”
A. P., Gloucestershire, UK.

This was a demanding observation, not easy to hold. Avoiding narrative, I used an organised jigsaw structure against a field of anger and violence. The pieces started to read as human, which wasn’t entirely comfortable.

Day 2: “Did not expect that dropping out of OCA [Open College of the Arts] would feel like such a relief- freedom, a new beginning, into the unknown!”
A. H., Écully, France.

This aligned closely with where I was at the time, having just finished with OCA. The shift into a different colour combination — pink and green — carried that sense of release. It felt like stepping into something less certain, but necessary.

Day 3. “Not far from here, blasts shatter lives and turn the world gray. And yet, here I am, in an Explosion of beauty and light! Wherever I look, millions of tulips …”
M. D., Istanbul, Türkiye

This sits between two conditions — a violent disruption pushing into a field of colour. The tulips hold for now, but they’re under pressure. That felt like the point.

Day 4. “I thought it was dead, but surprise new green shoots are now growing.”
P. H., Bettingen, Switzerland.

I held the surface close to the point where it could read as dead. The shoots only arrive if you spend time with it. They’re easy to miss, but that felt right.

Day 5. “A contract with the World Health Organisation in the European Office to train medical services in case of a radio-nuclear event.”
R. C., Sanremo, Italy.

I keep returning to documents and the authority they carry. They suggest a system in control, but the surface doesn’t quite support that. There’s a pressure building underneath that the diagrams try to contain but can’t. It starts structured, but doesn’t stay that way.

Week 2 Prompt - Describe any new beginning you have witnessed that felt important to you.

Day 1: “On seeing flowers, following a cataract operation: “The colours, the colours!””
L.W, Bude, Cornwall, UK.

This started as a colour problem — blue against orange, pushed until it all vibrates. With small amounts of fluorescent pigment doing more than the rest — it’s difficult to photograph, but holds-up in reality.

Day 2: “With age comes gratitude, each day feels like a fresh start, and simply being alive and well becomes a true blessing.”
V.K, Staines Upon Thames, Surrey, UK.

This observation gave me the opportunity to simply be alive and experience the fresh start to my day. Focusing on the trace of my heartbeat, the colours come in rhythms.

Day 3. “Planted my first pot of cat grass. With four cats in the building. It might be fun!”
K.D, Sanremo, Italy.

Cats! Unruly beings. I love cats. What is Gloria thinking?

Day 4. “I found the trace of a decommissioned train line. Finding that ‘Invisible Line’ wasn’t a discovery, it became the birth of a new way of seeing the ground beneath my …”
K.S, South Africa

“He’s gone all Jackson Pollock!” I hear you exclaim. This observation allowed me to make a performance piece. Listening intently to a 25-minute train recording, I drew continuously, with both hands, using oil pastel — translating the implied movement of an absent railway into a shift in how the ground is read.

Day 5. “Walking on the Golf Course the other day I noticed hundreds of beautiful butterflies. The air felt soft and warm, not hot or cold. Just right. The sky was a …”
A.B, Sanremo, Italy

Life is like a butterfly …

Week 1 Prompt - Describe a new beginning you witnessed within the last 7 days.

Day 1: “Spotted hosta shoots, a new war against slugs.”
D.S, Purley on Thames, UK.

Not being a gardener myself, I needed to research what hosta shoots are. Now I know.

Day 2: “Change in financial priorities!”
A.M, Inverness, UK.

Such a broad subject with little personal narrative led me to exploring the headlines of recent news. Each scrap is created using black acrylic paint onto tissue paper - a very tricky and messy process indeed.

Day 3. “my Garden as winter sheds its clothes so does spring bring forward blossom which Turn to apples every year it’s new again.”
D.L, Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, UK.

Blossoms are not my go-to subjects for painting. In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever painted blossoms, but I persevered. You might spot a little friend among the long grass.

Day 4. “Tiny green shoots breaking soil, the simplest kind of beginning.”
L.B, York, UK.

I show tiny green shoots and leaves emerging from under dark soil from the perspective of looking down. I painted the black soil over a field of variegated green, weaving my paintbrush around to isolate the little green shapes. As I progressed, starting with the tiny dots in the lower half, I felt the tiny shoots were beginning to grow and then fly away, in the wind.

Day 5. “A splendid historic Maltese band club, now being renovated and reimagined as a public space for music, food, and drink.”
P.H, Bettingen, Switzerland

I had to wonder what a historic Maltese band club might look like. I sensed a clear transformation was needed - a room in preparation for decoration against a space being prepared for music. A space devoid of much activity - a space waiting to come alive.

Each enters the selection pool.
One will be drawn at random
each studio day.
One will become a painting.

Responses for this week are accepted until Wednesday 08 April, 08:00GMT.

Start noticing small things …

Not yet joined?: How to Participate
If anything is unclear: FAQ
Background and concept: About

Correspondence is a participatory painting-archive project.
Each week people send a short observation in response to a prompt.
One observation is selected at random and turned into a painting in my studio in Sanremo, Italy.
The person whose observation is selected receives part of the painting by mail.
Participation is free. Anyone can take part.

To participate, read the guide: How to Participate
If anything is unclear: FAQ
Background and concept: About