What an art practice 'is' then is defined by its outermost edge, its boundary line or simply its line of flight, understood as the furthest point from within its territory. Indeed the artist, when he or she is an artist, is this line of flight, or more accurately operates on this line and at this edge - Simon O'Sullivan. 1

Edges both names a painting (made before the most recent lockdown) and also points towards artistic strategies of experimentation: what we might otherwise call painting's "edginess". In a philosophical sense, conceptualising an artwork's edge(s) requires a mapping of it's onto-epistemological parameters: running across/between its different materials, between the artwork and its beholder who "gets it", between the hand of individual artists and the collective work of communities, between art objects and history, between art and not-art, and crucially for much contemporary painting discourse, between the physical process of painting and our increasingly omnipresent use of the internet.

Of specific interest in my own research is the relationship between the edge and the network in certain "post-internet" painting practices which operate, at least in part, through the manipulation (appropriation) of signifying material, prompting an awareness of how images will continually - and of their own accord - move from context to context in virtual space, losing and gaining information or meaning. However it could be said that post-internet paintings betray the free-flowing circulation of which they are apparently proponents, by stilling the visual in a final image and begging the question: "what does painting mean in the age of the internet?"

Away from a line of questioning that transforms the painting into a predetermined object to be interpreted, this research considers the edges of artworks as complex rhizomatic structures; seams or thresholds that are continually in play. Painting's potential for representation, repetition and cliché may take on an immanent function here, used to assume new affective assemblages that allow for the potential emergence of new encounters. Here meaning emerges diagrammatically through a variety of dynamic processes.

With the continued coming-together of painting and the internet, this research considers the ways in which the internet is changing the game, more than as part of an ever-expanding system of references and contexts for painting (which is perhaps what painting has always been), but as the genuine becoming-internet of painting.

References
1. Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 32.