I am a Dharawal Country/South Coast-based artist. My drawings operate in a suspended zone between figuration and abstraction; they are not only illustrations of meaning but also situations of encounter and feeling. I depict only men, subjects shaped by my experience of the world as a male, representing the inner levers and controls of the mind, embodying the systemic forces that influence identity and thought. These figures, often headless or absorbed into abstract architecture, are caught in a theatre of repetition, surveillance, and disembodied labour. They are not portraits but procedures: subjects formatted by forces they cannot name. Heavily influenced by existential literature, particularly the absurd bureaucracies of Kafka, I approach drawing not as depiction but as exposure. The act of drawing slow, recursive, insistent becomes a way of thinking through the human condition: its alienation, its compulsions, and its fragile autonomy. The line is not illustrative but forensic.
In recent years, the theme of existential threat, particularly from AI systems that threaten to erode individual autonomy, has become an important element in my work. These systems embody a form of erasure, turning human subjectivity into data within opaque, controlling networks. My drawings respond to these fears by exploring the fragile boundary between human creativity and its artefact. They highlight the resilience and importance of human agency and creativity amid forces of automation and surveillance, raising questions about what remains of authentic human expression.
I am interested in the geometry of control—how space disciplines the body, how form encodes function, and how abstraction becomes ideology. Yet even within this, the human mark persists. Every line—deliberate, weighted, vulnerable—asserts a refusal to disappear entirely. The large black non-objective drawings punctuate this condition. They do not represent voids but enact them. Their surface is thick with refusal, silence, and finality—a counter-image to the drawn figure, a terminal station in the system of images.
Ultimately, these works ask: what remains when identity is formatted? When language fails? When systems outlive their subjects? For me, drawing is not a solution to these questions; it is the space in which they can be lived.
