Visual artists’ perspectives on the artist's statement: Negotiating language, identity, and legitimacy

Abstract

This study investigates contemporary visual artists’ perceptions of the artist's statement, focusing on its role, functions, and influence on creative practice. Although the artist's statement has become a near-obligatory component of professional artmaking, previous research has largely prioritised textual or theoretical analyses, overlooking artists’ own perspectives. To address this gap, practising visual artists ( n = 29) completed an online questionnaire offering open-ended reflections on their experiences of writing the statement. The responses were examined using thematic analysis to identify recurrent patterns of meaning. The findings reveal that the artists negotiate persistent tensions between institutional expectations and personal voice, between accessibility and “artspeak,” and between linguistic expression and the nonverbal nature of artistic thought. Writing the statement is viewed as both constraining and generative—a clarifying and reflective process that helps articulate motivation, position work within recognised discourses, and construct professional identity. The study conceptualises the artist's statement as a socially and rhetorically organised practice through which visual artists mediate between creative intention, linguistic convention, and institutional legitimacy. The statement thus emerges as a dynamic and constitutive element of contemporary art practice—one that simultaneously reflects and shapes the complex reciprocity amongst language, genre, and creative expression.