The Plastic Self
There is a surface that most of us learn to maintain. Smooth, frictionless, optimised —
armour so well fitted it eventually stops feeling like armour at all. This series begins with
that surface and asks what it costs, what it covers, and what happens when the fractures
show.
The forms emerge from lidar capture — bodies processed through digital technology until
they lose their texture, their weight, their rough human particularity. What remains looks
almost manufactured. The beauty of something made too smooth, too resolved, too
acceptable. Something essential removed in the removing.
The palette has shifted completely. Gone are the acid greens and screen colours of the
Age of Anxiety work. In their place — white, blush, pale lavender. Interior colours. The
colour of what is carried privately and rarely shown.
But there are fractures. Dark blues breaking through the pale surface. The underneath
showing. Not failures of the surface — the truth of it.
These images were captured on a train journey, moving through the world at speed,
surrounded by strangers, each in their own silence. The most interior work emerging from
the most ordinary circumstances. The private glimpsed in transit, in the unguarded
moment.
This series asks about the shapes we hold ourselves into. The surfaces we present as
selves. The distance between what is shown and what exists underneath. It emerges
from a space that has no established framework, no ready language. It exists in a gap —
between the plastic and the tender, between the surface and the fracture, between what
is shown to the world and what moves through a train window at speed, barely glimpsed,
already gone.replacing the physical one, rendered in paint that has body and resistance and time in it.
The colour itself is part of the argument. The digital world made physical, held still long
enough to be examined.
Against this I place the human — flesh, blood, psychological depth, the face in the
process of dissolving or emerging, never fully resolved. The contrast is direct and
deliberate. On one side the clean line, the flat plane, the cartoon simplification of the
human form — the depersonalised figure, the anonymous body, the self reduced to icon.
On the other, the raw and the visceral, the painterly mark that cannot be filtered or
optimised. Both exist on the same canvas. Neither wins. That unresolved tension is
where we actually li
