There is something that happens in the solitude of a studio. You slow down. You pay attention differently.
After switching from watercolour to oil painting a couple of years ago, I honed my craft in this new medium and on a larger scale. I accompanied my studio time with audiobooks and podcasts, opening up another avenue for learning, finding myself thinking more deeply and clearly about my journey and the world outside than I ever had before. And what I came to understand frightened me.
As I’ve written about before, we are living through the most consequential technological transition in human history. Superintelligent AI is not approaching — it is arriving. The systems being built right now will surpass human reasoning across almost every domain within this decade. Whether that future is built with genuine human values embedded in it or drifts beyond our understanding and control will determine everything. Most people are not yet paying attention.
For me, my advocacy is inseparable from the creation itself. It is not a position I hold alongside my art — it is what drives every decision about what to paint, and why. The studio became the place where that understanding deepened, converged, and made the urgent visible.
I have several new works in a group exhibition, ‘Two Painters and a Potter’, at the Macleay Island Arts Complex, showing alongside the work of Therese King and Paula Bowie, April 25 – May 22. I would love for you to come — not just to see the work, but to start a conversation. About AI, about the future, about what we do with what we know. I do not offer answers here. I offer a room in which to feel the weight of the question. That conversation can begin anywhere. It might as well begin here.
See Beth’s art and exhibition details on Instagram at @bethleachcreative.
