My instinct tells me, ‘open like any application; statement, bio, project proposal, word count’. This is how I’ve grown accustomed to using Microsoft Word. Two years into a professional practice post-college, I’m running on an 80/20 balance between application writing and work making. The aim of the application process is to flip this 80/20 in the other direction, to secure support so I can get stuck into the fun bit. As much as I’ve resented how much of my time is taken up by application writing, I have learned a lot about contemporary art practice through this process.

Taking it back to primary school English lessons, introducing descriptive writing and sentence formation through the idea of ‘imagine an alien just landed on earth, they know nothing about you or how you live, now explain’. This still rattles through my brain every time I start writing a new application. It’s helped me to contextualize, making sense of the bizarre, both in my work and my brain. It’s part of an artist’s professional practice that formal education doesn’t really prepare you for, from my experience anyway. That alongside the existential dread of what is my life as a recent graduate but I don’t think that’s exclusive to artists, we’re probably just more prone to it because, jobs?

Something I find interesting in all of it is how much of it takes place digitally. Whether you’re a painter, sculptor, printmaker, or film photographer, in order to apply for state funding, international opportunities, or exhibitions down the road, everyone must have some sort of access to a computer, or the internet and have the skills to use them. Even for traditional mediums, we must all centre our professional practices around a computer-based application process, we’re all forced to implement the digital somehow.

I sometimes feel like I’m cheating the system when referring to my practice as ‘professional’. Be this the result of imposter syndrome or my work-from-home POV. My studio exists within the four walls of my laptop screen, positioned on my kitchen table amongst domestic clutter, hard drives and USBC converters. Positioning my practice in a work-from-home environment has led me to take on additional domestic tasks.

A natural occurrence, especially when acting as a means of procrastination, that has since become riddled with impending doom because does this now make me a housewife? This post-studio laptop condition has created a fine line between a work-from-home artist and a stay-at-home mam with no kids.

The looming feeling of thinking I’ll eventually slip into a stereotypical gender role as a side effect of a laptop-based practice is how www.stayathomehun.com was born. A bi-product of 2020, I developed a performative personality, the ‘stay-at-home hun’, to explore desires of escapism resulting from the confinements of femininity, at large and in the home, and the problematics of the domestic goddess. She looked to the online world as her utopian escape, reimagining the everyday to abstract the banality of it all, finding comfort and freedom in the surreal and bizarre.

This persona still lives online in her ‘EXCESSIVELY CHAOTIC UTOPIAN ESCAPE’, claiming the webpage as a home, a site for existence, performance and endurance of female experience. The webpage has since become my comfort zone, my safe space of creation, a format that my processes have become bent and angled towards.

Pre 2020 me, a Sculpture and Combined Media student at LSAD would be stunned to think that my degree show took the form of a website. A self-proclaimed technophobe who idolized high-end video art but was too put off by cameras because who’s ISO and what’s an F-stop? I still don’t have a clue and maybe that’s obvious in my work for those that do but the difference is I don’t really care. I’ve found a way that suits me to mash things together, throw them into different software and get them out to an audience all from the same kitchen table.

I love the idea of someone who is formally trained in these processes looking over my shoulder as I nail my green screen to a wall, make some botched pngs and heavily layered exports and think ‘what is she at?’. That for me is the beauty of a ‘post-studio practice’; a postmodern conception, a rejection of physical confinements of a traditional studio and the methodologies that happen within.

The arrival of the internet and the emergence of digitally based practices have amplified this way of practicing, with even more growth I imagine since 2020’s online migration by force majeure. It seems strange to say but this world crisis actually worked out the better for my practice. My work simply would not have developed to its current state and place if I wasn’t forced into digital confinements. Having to consider my works engagement to an exclusively online audience, applying a social media framework to my practice; how to contain engagement of one piece of content along the infinite scroll.

Not to belittle digital art to content but it is not uncommon for our work to become merged with the overwhelming saturation of imagery that those who engage with an online lifestyle succumb to. It’s hard to compete with this and it does terrify me to think about the future of digital, media, video and fine art photography alongside social media.

Having been forced to reduce a practice down to this framework is what I think sets artists apart from people who have a camera on their phone or create for social media purposes. You consider this way of production and learn how to turn it back on itself, with consideration for a different audience. Though I’m not sure the white-walled gallery space is where this audience lies, or where I necessarily want my audience to lie.

If a post-studio laptop based practice is working outside the traditional art space, a rejection of which, how can it adapt to the traditional exhibition model in a formal gallery setting? An outdated format that has not grown and developed in the same way that artists have around it. How do we begin to create our own?

This post-studio laptop condition is not accessible to everyone. €1,200 for a piece of second-hand hardware, access to the internet, monthly subscriptions to software or a friend with cracked versions. But in our current cost of living crisis, it has become more accessible for some than traditional physical studio access. Being laptop, internet-based is a reaction to expanded cultural platforms and the reality of our societal screen-based existence.

This state of creation is a natural development for Gen-Z and borderline millennials and I imagine will be inescapable for Gen Alpha and whoever’s to come after that. Though this way of working has been taken as a means of must rather than will from my own perspective, I find that a post-studio laptop condition has allowed more room for experimentation, an expanded practice that is not limited by walls but instead by 2560 x 1600 pixels; the resolution of a 2017 MacBook Pro, the pixel wall that my practice has lived behind to date.

A new media practice is naturally going to be more experimentally accepting, but it feels that continuing to implement the digital further and further into my practice is the only way to transgress our current conditions; from outdated systems to new means of expression, and exploration. By not having the pressures that come with formally presenting work in a gallery setting while still maintaining some sort of audience, online means of display and presentation of work gives more room to failure, for work in progress that may be a flop. Removing this pressure in my own practice has allowed me to take more risks, to not be precious about work, and to not feel the need to define anything as ‘done’.

We’re constantly in a state of flux, developing, progressing, revisiting, reimagining, how can we ever know if what we present as a ‘realised’ work is going to actually be that realised version? We simply don’t and we shouldn’t. What drives me to continue implementing digital, online processes into my practice is not only the unavoidability of having grown up between two worlds, offline and online but the fact that this type of making encourages an exploration of the unseen, unfinished, undone elements.

It allows us to question what’s been predefined as art for us and create in a way that unmasks the plastic reality of the imagery and overload of content we consume. The internet as an art space allows for highbrow and lowbrow to exist alongside one another, DIY and professional, luxury and banality. Generally speaking, it’s an equalizing space.

When looking back at writing around arts early days on the World Wide Web, the potential of increased connectivity and networks that make the globe smaller was central to its draw. At 25 years old I don’t know the world without this easily accessible global connectivity. I think that we’ve become so over-saturated by connectedness that we forget to make use of it, particularly in an art network context. Not that I think digital connection can replace real-life, in-the-flesh interaction, but from a post-studio laptop condition there have to be better uses of this connectivity beyond sharing memes and reels of cats kneading dough. (link : for those interested).

Maybe it’s a response to the trauma of our Zoom, Ms Teams era, but if our studios are still existing in the same format as that time then what calls for abandoning these methods? For those of us still sat at a kitchen table missing the informal chats and feedback that takes place in a physical studio setting, sharing your work beyond your housemates without committing to an entire social media post, we need to encourage networking beyond our daily online habits.

We need a space where we can shit post, photo dump, scroll free from the mercy of the algorithm, a dedicated online space for art connectivity. We need to get back to the roots of the World Wide Web, an early-internet-post-post-internet-art revival, let’s remake our Bebo pages, write blogs, replace the white cube with the white tab and fully digitize this post studio laptop condition.

about Fiona Gordon 💻

Images courtesy of the artist, 2023.

This text was written for the first issue of Additional, the screen service e-newsletter.