Statements that get interviews.

Last October I spent forty minutes in front of one painting: Frank Auerbach's "Mornington Crescent". Up close it stopped being a street and became a record of decisions, hundreds of them, scraped back and remade. I went home and repainted a corner of my own street seven times, scraping back each attempt, keeping the record. That question, how a painting can hold its own history, is what I want three years to investigate. My current work uses layered household emulsion on board because I am interested in surfaces that carry evidence of labour, and I want access to tutors and printmaking facilities that can push this beyond what I can teach myself in a garage.

For the past two years I have run a five-person theatre group out of our village hall, which has taught me more about acting than any class: mostly that performance is logistics before it is art. I directed and performed in two self-written shows, handling rights enquiries, a £300 budget and an audience of ninety. Seeing Kae Tempest perform at the Roundhouse changed how I think about presence; they barely moved, and I have been working on stillness since, testing it in a monologue I filmed monthly to track what changed. I take weekly movement classes and read one play a week, most recently "Jerusalem", which I chose because I disagreed with a review of it.

Music technology A level gave me the vocabulary, but maths gave me the ears. Studying Fourier series finally explained why my mixes sounded cluttered: I was stacking instruments into the same frequency bands. I rebuilt my last EP around that understanding, carving space with EQ before reaching for volume, and the difference is audible between tracks one and five. My EPQ on the loudness war taught me to research primary sources, interviewing two mastering engineers by email. Physics has made me the person in our band who understands why the room ruins the recording, and I want to study acoustics properly rather than by trial and error.