at the mercy of the scroll

i have not found a way to make social media work for me. years of trying, deleting profiles, starting again, repeating the cycle. i've never sold anything through it. i've collected likes, but you can't live on likes. no real business, no lasting recognition. just the cycle.

i happens so fast. my attention scatters, my chest tightens, and my defences rise. i’m shown so much i would never choose to invite into my day: content that leaves me tense and slightly ashamed for watching, news fragments designed to spike stress but offering no context and no way to respond, endless attempts at being noticed with very little substance. and i notice something else too. i think i’d have a different relationship with social media if the feed leaned more toward what i chose, and less toward what was injected. a feed made of my own choices would still be noisy at times, but it would feel like mine. what drains me is the sense of being steered. it turns looking into exposure, and i take that as information. something in me is trying to protect my attention.

at the same time, i know confrontation isn’t always bad. sometimes it’s healthy to see something you didn’t go looking for. an image can wake you up, unsettle a fixed perspective, show you what you’ve been avoiding. i don’t want to live inside a perfectly curated bubble. but there’s a difference between being met by something real, and being managed by a system built to capture attention.

i grew up with a large book called ‘the history of art’ and my dad’s collection of medical books on anatomy. i was absorbed by them. those images shaped me, not by persuading me, but by giving me something to return to, something that could hold my attention without demanding anything back. and i can’t help wondering, if i’m honest, whether i would have found the same concentrated direction if i’d grown up now, with the endless feed in my hands, pulling my attention apart before it could deepen.

images for me have power and importance, but in the feed artworks don’t stay artworks for long. they become images: compressed, sped up, made to travel. and when i say images, i also mean reels, stories, and the rest of the moving feed. lately the influx of ai-generated images has added another layer. it doesn’t just increase the volume, it destabilises trust. you start to question what you’re looking at, and that uncertainty becomes its own kind of manipulation. of course every image influences. what i resist is the demand that influence be predictable, measurable, and convertible. buy, believe, envy, react. even when i’m “just looking,” it can feel like being handled.

there was a hype for a while within creative circles on instagram: artists presenting their painting from the back and slowly turning it to reveal the work. i remember questioning why an artist of all people would follow a trend like that. it started to feel like the platform speaking through the work, using formats, but i could also sense the hunger underneath it, the desire to be seen and heard, and how quickly that desire gets shaped by what the platform rewards. what i felt most wasn’t anger. it was a kind of misplaced embarrassment. and yes, my inner painting teacher had opinions, but the real discomfort was the audition feeling, as if i was watching someone get pulled into a format that wasn’t theirs. it made me wonder why an artist, someone who knows what it takes to make something real, would choose something that flattens the work into a reveal and a number.

i’m not saying this to judge anyone, even though i do make knee-jerk judgements that i later need to correct. i can’t know what’s going on in another person. i’m describing what happens in me as i move through that environment, and what i notice it does to the space i’m looking through. it quietly trains a certain kind of behaviour if you want to be seen, and it doesn’t care what it costs your attention.

my aim with my own work is the opposite. i want to offer a window into an emotion, or a mirror to something you might already half know but haven’t named. but after that, it’s not mine. i make the work, and then i release it. my enjoyment is in the creating, not in managing what happens afterwards. if people resonate, that matters. if the work sells, it keeps the studio going and allows me to continue. but i’m no longer trying to extract a response. my work needs slowness and ambiguity. the feed rewards speed and legibility, and it rewards outcomes that can be counted.

when I say I care about integrity, I don’t mean being perfect. i mean the absence of posturing and smoothing over imperfections just to be palatable or shareable.  it can be painful, confronting and raw but it feels clean.

i deleted my last instagram profile and created a new one, trying again to find the balance. i still haven't found it. if i'm honest, i'd rather not need it at all. i'm hoping the work can find its audience in the real world, in rooms rather than feeds.