Standard Deviation follows a line of enquiry that recurs across twenty-five years of Patrick Waterhouse's practice. Discrete projects are printed onto A4 sheets of paper. This lends coherent form to the bounty of ideas present in the room. Strung together this way, a series of original artworks, disparate in size and medium, are democratised in a standard form, without hierarchy in this sequence, whether they were first presented as oil paintings made in China, incomplete drawings for a series of lectures by the Burnsteins showing the different levels of sin in Dante's hell, video animations by the artist, to list only a few examples. Collected together, the works appear as iterations, as if the same object was shifted around to make all other things. A red circle that grows smaller. Pieces of a test that are endlessly arranged and rearranged. Standardisation is offered to present a visual acknowledgment of the artist’s preoccupation with ‘dividual’ intelligence: intelligence as a collective, evolving entity shaped by context, iteration, and error rather than being the province of one individual, of one mind. “How do you put thoughts into images in a way that helps people know that thoughts are ideologies? This can be done through putting unlike things together that show their likeness, it can be done through subversion, or intervention,” says the artist. “You need categorisation, but it’s also the start of all the problems, the differences… We need category to understand the world but category can lead to tyranny.” The collected works demonstrate, to quote a phrase that opens the room, how: Every idea is a migrant, or looking beneath this phrase at Waterhouse’s work that references Arthur Schopenhauer, Something can be true and untrue at the same time. “Our ideas bloom from a lifetime’s collection of other people’s ideas,” Waterhouse says.

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A4's Reading Room is an adaptable space attached to A4's Library and Archive. Intended to solve for form depending on its required function, it is at once a bookish environment for reading and contemplation and a place to unpack artists' archives. The Reading Room's inter-leading doors become walls when locked to create a stand-alone spatial research studio that hosts residents and practices site-specific work that most often is connected to packing and unpacking projects as a form of research.