Digital Presence

July 4, 2026

Gathering the Pieces and Putting It Together

When I began building ART1, I thought I was creating a website.

I soon realised I was doing something quite different.

I was gathering together more than forty years of a creative life that had become scattered across the internet.

Like many artists, I had spent decades making work rather than documenting it.

There had been exhibitions.

Performances.

Photography.

Teaching.

Movement direction.

Collections.

Articles.

Interviews.

Art prizes.

Community projects.

Gallery work.

Most of those moments had happened, been published somewhere, and then quietly disappeared from view.

Or so I thought.

As ART1 grew, I began researching my own history. Not out of nostalgia, but because I wanted to build an accurate archive.

What I discovered surprised me.

Pieces of my career were everywhere.

A production from twenty years ago appeared in AusStage.

A movement direction credit surfaced on IMDb.

A photograph from a DanceSport championship appeared in Getty Images.

An old ABC story.

Council documents.

Museum collections.

Art prize catalogues.

Gallery records.

Community archives.

Planning documents.

Newspaper articles.

Professional profiles.

Exhibition listings.

Social media.

Search engines.

AI search results.

None of these had been created for me.

They had been created independently, over many years, by organisations documenting their own activities.

Together they formed something I had never consciously assembled.

A digital record of a creative life.

That changed the way I thought about websites.

For years, artists have been told that they need a website.

Today, that advice is incomplete.

A website is still important because it is the one place you fully control.

But your digital presence extends far beyond it.

Collectors search.

Curators search.

Journalists search.

Galleries search.

Researchers search.

Increasingly, AI systems search as well.

They do not rely on a single website.

They build understanding from many connected sources.

Each exhibition catalogue.

Each museum collection.

Each newspaper article.

Each institutional archive.

Each interview.

Each artist profile.

Each reference becomes another piece of evidence that helps describe who you are and what your practice represents.

Individually they tell only a small part of the story.

Together they create something much richer.

That is why building ART1 gradually became less about publishing photographs and more about creating coherence.

The website became the central place where decades of work could connect.

Not replacing the past.

Connecting it.

Every reference strengthened another.

Every archive supported another.

Every article provided context for another.

The internet had already been remembering parts of my career.

I simply had not realised how many pieces already existed.

This experience changed the way I think about digital practice.

Artists often imagine that building an online presence means starting from nothing.

In reality, many already have a digital history.

Exhibitions.

Awards.

News stories.

Gallery records.

Professional organisations.

University archives.

Government documents.

Collections.

Public talks.

Social platforms.

The challenge is not creating all of it.

The challenge is finding it, verifying it, connecting it and making it understandable.

That is what a digital studio has become.

Not simply a place where new work is published.

A place where a lifetime of creative practice is brought together into a coherent whole.

Building ART1 taught me something unexpected.

I was not creating my digital history. I was discovering it.

And then, piece by piece, putting it back together.

Digital Presence in Practice

While researching and building the ART1 archive, I discovered references to my creative practice across a wide range of independent organisations, institutions, archives and platforms. The following list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates how a creative life can become distributed across the web over many decades.