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All artists hope to develop a language which is distinctively theirs. That’s likely to take years of experiment and reflection. It needs to feel earned, not just arbitrary. But then, once you have one, how do you keep it fresh? No serious artist wants to be mired in a predictability which means they’re not interested in what they themselves are doing. One way out of that is to use the language to say new things, another is to keep the language fluid by ongoing variation. Either way, something external needs to come in. Katie Pratt, Caroline Jane Harris, Bella Easton and Dillwyn Smith show how that can work – not just the content but the forms of their well-grounded approaches to making work are constantly moved on by chance, time, material and place.

All four artists, then, have found means of using the externalities of chance, place, time and material to infect their particular languages with new forms. They also share wider sensibilities: all bring transition between time and place into their processes, can be read as referring to landscape and mapping, trammel between outside and inside and are – almost paradoxically – skilled in discovering ‘accidental’ effects. Moreover, the structuring backdrop of the modernist grid, explicitly present in Easton and Harris, is also echoed less obviously in Pratt and Smith. Yet what is fascinating in the end is that the four can share so much, yet remain – in their forms of autonomy – so utterly distinct.