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Process

Process Journal

Sketches, tests, failures, installations, field notes, and the physical actions through which a work comes into being.

Three forms of writing

Notes from making. Arguments from research. Language as work.

Generated visual study of a pale green pendant shown front and reverse, with four recessed inscription fields on each side.
Process Journal

A Key Without a Key

A process record about a first London home, borrowed key sound, museum-object research, generated studies that were rejected, and the hand-cut address inscription still to come.

Open process record
Black ink glyph derived from the artist’s palm lines, brush-written and vectorized into an archaic-style symbol on white background.
Process Journal

Fate Recognition: A Hand Learns to Read Itself

A 2020 photography and video project record in which palm lines, bodily gestures and leaf drawings become temporary signs of recognition.

Open process record
Installation of branch-built tree with sagging knotted rope net, a boulder marked by handprints, and drifting smoke — reflecting on the fragility of time and the necessity of living fully rather than merely recording.
Process Journal

Knotting Culture, Carving Culture: Making a Record by Hand

A 2021 project record for an installation of rope, wood, canvas and stone, developed through knotting systems, maps, sketches and performance.

Open process record
Five-panel painting series by Scarlett Guan (2022), made with coal dust, iron rust, and sulfur dioxide on canvas, installed against a concrete wall; each panel visualizes a different classical Chinese poem. 2022
Process Journal

My Home, My Hometown: Coal, Clay and Poetry Painting

A 2021 project record tracing coal, clay, literary inheritance and a five-panel painting series back to an encounter with falling leaves.

Open process record
Red and green Pringles cans stacked as towers beside crisps spelling Isn’t It Beautiful on a grey plinth.
Process Journal

Isn’t It Beautiful? Stacking a City from Pringles

How Pringles cans, parallel domestic routines and an insistent question became a playful city about repetition, tenderness and shared belonging.

Open process record
Abstract drawing made with collected cigar ash, depicting two leg-like forms referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias — a meditation on the fragility of power and memory.
Process Journal

Look On My Works!

A project text tracing ambition, ruin, memory, and the unstable afterlife of monuments through material and language.

Open process record
I sat under a knotted rope “tree” installation beside a stone with handprints, evoking Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the existential act of waiting.
Process Journal

To Knot Is to Hope

A project text on knotting as repetition, attachment, endurance, and a quiet material form of hope.

Open process record
EN: Close-up of a bird drawn with cigar ash, wings spread wide as if caught mid-flight, embodying rebellion, freedom, and youthful desire.
Process Journal

Bird Series

A project text on the Bird Series, using coal and ash drawings to hold movement, fragility, memory, and disappearance.

Open process record
Instagram@scarlett.x.guan