As I went about my week, I wrestled with the question posed by our tutor: What does art mean to me?

At first, in my journal, I wrote a list of words – aesthetics, language, expression, communication, challenge, mind-expanding, objecthood etc. I began to imagine a geometric form, like a dodecahedron, with each side bearing a word, a concept.

But as I moved through my routines and subroutines – riding the London Underground, filling a skip with house-clearance junk, pausing to watch a pigeon bathe in the fountain outside the Saatchi Gallery, enjoying a cold beer on a bench outside the Butcher’s Tap in Chelsea, getting caught in a shower, or simply working – I kept questioning whether that was it. Was art all those things? Or none? Could I reduce it to one essential meaning from which all others would flower?

That line of inquiry reduced my earlier list to two central ideas: expression and language. Which comes first? Does one precede the other?

Language is a tool to communicate, to convey. But you can express without it. Much of our emotional state can be understood beyond o

r beneath words. So, is art expression? Is all expression art?

I circled the subject – now standing on the platform at Waterloo, watching the noticeboard for my train – concluding that not all expression is art. Art requires framing. It needs a context, or at least an interpretation as art. Even as I tried to distil meaning into a single word, the meaning began to expand again.

I began to see that intent matters – but that intent doesn’t always originate with the maker. All things form by and through expression, but they are transformed into art through recognition as language – as symbol, as sign.

That recognition can come from someone else entirely. Take Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: a mass-produced urinal, reoriented and signed “R. Mutt, 1917.” Is it art? And who is the artist — Duchamp, the designer, the factory worker?

Now, at the end of the week – standing at the kitchen counter of an empty house, with my laptop and an empty coffee cup — I’ve arrived at a conclusion:

Art, to me, is expression framed by language and symbol, independent of time.
This framing gives it shape – not a static polyhedron, but a spinning globe , with ideas and concepts connected through a network of songlines that can stretch, one day, beyond the stars.