Guest House: Unwriting the Artist’s Statement Workshop with Elle Reynolds

Writing from practice: speaking through the work

Join us for a focused, playful session of conversation, making, and discovering your own voice. This workshop creates space to build confidence, loosen habits around language, and allow your voice to develop naturally, staying close to your practice rather than separate from it.

Unwriting the Artist’s Statement invites you to abscond from International Art English and respond directly to your work. Moving away from the critical language often used to address contemporary art, this workshop proposes different protocols for speaking about your practice to the world.

Through a series of guided prompts, improvisation, and gentle exercises, participants will work with revision, association, and a deliberate quality of randomness, to develop ways of using their own voice. The focus is on speaking through the work rather than separating language from practice.

This is a supportive space for play, experimentation, and discovery. No previous experience or prepared text is needed.

The workshop is hosted by IMT Gallery and led by artist Elle Reynolds, whose practice works through collaborative processes, storytelling, and material experimentation. Her work explores making as a way of thinking together, with a particular interest in shared authorship, provisional forms, and the social life of materials.

Over the two hours, you will:

• Develop new ways of talking about your work that feel personal and less rehearsed
• Loosen habits around formal or institutional language
• Build confidence in speaking and writing about your practice
• Generate material you can continue to develop after the session
• Connect with others navigating similar questions around language and practice.

About Elle Reynolds:

Artist/scholar\researcher\quiet disrupter, Elle Reynolds has a background in organising practice. She continually challenges traditional institutional structures, reimagining the use of time and space. Her art making under the pseudonym Guest-Host-Guest includes object installation, collaborative events, performative storytelling and interventions that unsettle the notion of archive through spatial exploration, participation, and the disruption of academic language. She holds a PhD investigating alternative art school spaces and serves as a Non-Executive Director and Board member of TOMA (The Other MA), an alternative art school in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. Recent projects include workshops for New Contemporaries and Creative Break Time. She is currently Programme Leader of the Graduate Diploma in Art at Goldsmiths.

This workshop is open to all: makers, artists, writers, anti-writers, poets, curators at any stage of their practice, and anyone interested in finding alternative ways to speak about their work. It is especially useful if you are preparing portfolios, applications, or exhibitions, or if you simply want your language to feel more natural and connected to what you do.

What to bring:

A notebook and pen, a favourite word, your curiosity, a willingness to get hands-on, and an open mind.

Places are limited to keep the session conversational and supportive—book early to secure your place.

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Images:

[1] Morass Mapping (2025) by Elle Reynolds
[2] Still from No Telos (2019) by Elle Reynolds
[3] Still from Page Turner (2019 - 2026) by Elle Reynolds