Jim Cheatle’s digital works grow out of his long-standing practice of making physical assemblage paintings. Over the past few years, he has been training generative systems on those assemblages – feeding them the textures, shapes and compositional habits that define the studio work – and using the results as a way to push his thinking further than the materials themselves will allow.

These prints aren’t digital imitations of objects; they’re compositions built from a vocabulary the software has learned from Cheatle’s handling of plaster, plastic, resin, and painted surfaces. The aim is to extend his mark-making into an imaginary space where the constraints of scale, weight, and physical construction no longer apply. Each piece sits somewhere between the logic of his assemblages and the freedoms of a digital environment: familiar in tone, but not tied to any real-world material.

The Plastic, Rock, and Plaster series are part of this ongoing investigation. Each print begins as a digital composition and is then produced as a high-quality digital print on Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper. They read almost like new species of object – things that could exist physically, but don’t yet – carrying forward Cheatle’s interest in how form can be built, broken, and reassembled.