Structure and Chaos brings together altered government publications and reflections from artists, policymakers, curators and researchers on the role art can play in policymaking.

Images drawn from policy reports are subjected to water and material disruption, causing official graphics, photographs and language to bleed, pool and partially dissolve. They are placed alongside accounts of moments when artistic practice has interrupted familiar ways of seeing, knowing and working within institutions.

The book moves between structure and instability: systems designed to organise knowledge and action are made materially uncertain. Quotations range from the Artist Placement Group’s work inside government and industry to contemporary experiences of artistic practice in the public sector, asking not simply how art might illustrate policy, but what happens when it changes the conditions in which policy is imagined.

The work developed alongside Bennett’s wider research into artists working within institutions and the conditions that allow artistic practice to influence public decision-making.