The artist statement and short bio: what a commissioning panel needs from them
The artist statement and the short biography are two separate documents doing two different jobs for a commissioning panel: the statement says how the practice works and why this site suits it, commonly in 150 to 300 words, and the biography evidences what has actually been delivered, commonly in 100 to 150 words. There is no standard length for either: each call sets its own limit, those two bands are simply the ones that recur most often in UK calls, and the limit printed in the brief beats anything said here. Panels read the two documents for opposite reasons. The statement is read to judge whether the artist has anything to say about this place. The biography is read to judge whether the artist can be trusted with a construction programme and public money.
What a panel needs from each document
A panel needs the statement to be specific and the biography to be checkable, and it needs neither of them to be persuasive. Persuasion is what the proposal is for. These two documents are screening material, read fast, alongside dozens of others. A full specimen statement appears further down, under the heading on writing the statement.
| Attribute of the document | Artist statement | Short biography |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | First person | Third person |
| Tense | Present | Past |
| Typical length requested | 150 to 300 words | 100 to 150 words |
| What it must contain | Materials, methods, recurring concerns, how the practice meets a site | Base, training or route in, delivered commissions with client and year, relevant technical experience |
| What it must not contain | A proposal for this commission | Ambitions, adjectives, unfinished projects described as achievements |
| How it is used later | Usually stays in the application file | Reused in the committee report and the press release |
The last row explains a great deal. A biography that a council officer can lift straight into a committee report, without rewriting, is doing the panel a favour, and panels notice. A biography written as advertising has to be rewritten by somebody, and that somebody will cut the parts the artist cared about.
The statement about the practice and the statement about the site
Two different statements exist and applications routinely send the wrong one. The statement about the practice describes how the artist works across all projects: the materials, the processes, the scale, the concerns that recur, and the kind of situation the work does well in. The statement about the site describes what this particular place suggests, what the artist noticed about it, and how their way of working meets it. Most calls ask for the first at expression of interest stage and the second at shortlist stage, and a call that asks for both will say so.
Sending the site statement too early looks like a proposal made before a site visit. Sending the practice statement when the site statement was asked for looks like an application posted to nine commissioners on the same afternoon. Where the call is ambiguous, the safe reading is that the panel wants the practice described first and the site addressed in one closing paragraph that shows the brief has been read.
How to write the biography
To write the biography, work backwards from what the panel has to verify, and build it in five sentences.
- Open with the name, the base and the medium, since a panel needs to know within one line who this is and what they make.
- Give the route in, whether that is a degree, an apprenticeship, a trade background or years of practice, in a single clause.
- Name two or three delivered commissions with the commissioning body, the material, the scale and the year attached to each.
- Name the relevant technical experience, such as working with fabricators, engineers or main contractors, or delivering on a live construction site.
- Close with anything that answers a likely doubt, such as regional knowledge, experience of consultation, or work in the same material as the brief.
Write it in the third person even though it feels strange, because that is the form a report, a programme note and a press release all need. Keep it under the stated limit. Delete every adjective that could apply to any artist, since a panel that reads twelve biographies in a row stops seeing words like innovative and immersive by the third one.
How to write the statement
To write the statement, describe the work as somebody would who had to build it, then say what it is about. That order matters. A panel that cannot picture the physical work does not have anywhere to put the ideas.
A workable shape runs to five sentences: the medium and the scale worked at; the two or three concerns that recur across the practice, such as the industrial history of a place, movement through a space, or the behaviour of a material over time; the method, meaning how a project actually starts and what the artist does first; how the practice deals with a place it does not know, which is the question a site specific brief is really asking; and what the artist wants a person standing in front of the work to notice, in plain words.
A worked example
The statement below is a specimen written for this page. It is not the work of any real artist, and the practice described in it is invented. It is set out in full because the difference between a statement that works and one that does not is only visible at sentence level.
It does the five in order, and the concerns are named as concerns rather than as themes, which is the sentence most statements get wrong. Nothing in it proposes anything for a particular commission, and that is what keeps one statement usable across several applications.
What does not belong in a commission application
Four kinds of text get pasted into commission applications and all four cost marks. Gallery wall text is written to be read while standing in front of a finished work, so it assumes the work is present and the reader has time, and neither is true here. Instagram captions and social profile bios are compressed for a scroll and read as unserious in a document that will be attached to a committee report. Grant application prose is written for a funder’s assessment criteria, which are not the panel’s criteria. A manifesto answers a question nobody on the panel asked.
The tell is the audience. A commissioning panel is typically five to nine people including a council officer, an architect or landscape architect, a community representative, a funder and sometimes an artist or curator. Only one or two of them read art writing routinely. The document that works is the one the community representative and the officer both understand on a first reading, and that the curator does not find empty.
Keeping both documents current
Maintain one master version of each and cut down from it, rather than writing fresh under deadline pressure. Keep a full biography of about 300 words and trim to whatever limit a call sets. Keep the practice statement at the upper limit commonly asked for and cut rather than pad. Update the delivered commissions list the week each project finishes, while the budget, the material specification, the client name and the completion date are still to hand, because those four details are exactly what a future panel will want and exactly what is impossible to reconstruct two years later.