The Conversations explores communication as both a necessary and unstable part of human experience. Language is central to how we relate to one another, yet meaning is rarely fixed: it is shaped by context, perception, emotion, power, and the limits of what can be said, heard, or agreed upon. This body of work considers the space between minds—the places where understanding is formed, strained, misdirected, or left incomplete.
The series began with an interest in forms of communication that operate at cross purposes: debate without listening, rhetoric without mutual recognition, and the increasing difficulty of sustaining shared understanding across political, social, and interpersonal divides. These concerns were sharpened by the atmosphere surrounding Brexit, environmental and scientific debate, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the conflicts around so-called cancel culture, but they extend beyond any single moment. They continue to open onto broader questions about who determines acceptable language, how those boundaries shift, and what happens when speech becomes both a social battleground and a tool of alignment, control, or exclusion.
Formally, the work remains open. In some pieces, abstraction allows communication to be approached through tension, rhythm, interruption, and silence. In others, language itself may enter the work more directly. One developing strand uses rings of “cancelled words,” drawn from terms briefly established or institutionally sanctioned through style guides, equity language frameworks, and organisational codes of acceptable speech. In this context, words are not treated as stable carriers of meaning, but as charged cultural objects—revised, contested, and repositioned over time.
At its core, The Conversations is concerned with the unstable territory around expression: what is said, what is withheld, what is regulated, what is misread, and what remains unresolved. The work invites viewers to reflect on their own experience of language and to consider how meaning is negotiated not only through speech, but through omission, framing, permission, and silence.
