The Apophenia Series: Artist Statement (Abstract Painting) Antony Clarkson 2025

Apophenia: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).

My practice across painting, sculpture, and installation investigates the intersections of perception, spatial experience, and memory. It seeks to interrogate the conditions through which meaning is constructed, proposing encounters that unsettle habitual modes of seeing and invite critical reflection on the processes that structure visual and embodied understanding.

The Apophenia Series comprises abstract paintings derived from subjective experience and recollection. While non-representational, the works deliberately mobilise forms that evoke a sense of uncanny familiarity without resolving into determinate imagery. Subtle anthropomorphic suggestions may emerge, yet these remain provisional and unstable. Elements within each composition appear to prompt associative readings, only to disrupt or contradict them elsewhere. Attempts to secure a fixed referent inevitably generate perceptual dissonance, exposing the instability of depiction as a category.

The theoretical framework underpinning this series engages contemporary cognitive accounts of perception, particularly predictive-processing models that characterise vision as an inferential and anticipatory system. Rather than passively recording external reality, the brain is understood to construct perceptual experience through a dynamic negotiation between sensory input and prior expectation. Perception thus operates through probabilistic inference: incomplete stimuli are supplemented by memory, habit, and preconception.

Within this context, the Apophenia Series functions as a material analogue to these cognitive processes. By presenting ambiguous configurations that resist stabilisation, the paintings foreground the viewer’s active role in producing meaning. When associative pattern recognition generates coherence where none is definitively prescribed, perception enters the domain of apophenia, the projection of significance onto indeterminate form.

Through this destabilisation, the work positions perception itself as contingent and constructed. The paintings do not seek to obscure meaning, but to reveal its emergence as a negotiated, provisional act, situated between stimulus and expectation, presence and projection.

​In this way, the Apophenia Series extends beyond formal abstraction to operate as a critical inquiry into the mechanics of seeing itself. By sustaining a tension between familiarity and indeterminacy, the works expose the viewer’s interpretative activity as both generative and fallible. Meaning is neither embedded nor denied; it arises contingently through the encounter. The paintings thus function as sites in which perception becomes self-aware, where the act of looking folds back upon itself, revealing vision not as transparent access to the world, but as a constructed, negotiated, and perpetually revisable process.