Self Portrait 2026

Product description

I am currently exploring the power of traditional media to create analogue reflections of a digital world that feels increasingly dystopian. More specifically, I am focussing on the power of the mobile phone and AI to disconnect and disempower us, given their destructive influence in areas as profound as: ecological catastrophe; the dissemination of misinformation; and economic colonialism. / My mobile phone portraits are inversions of AI images. AI is a black box that can produce instant, slick, digital pictures of anything, via an interface. The inverse of that is slow, sloppy, single renditions of the interface itself, produced in an analogue medium, by a real person.

The medium is watercolour pencil, and the interface is the home screens of mobile phones. / Traditionally in portraiture, sitters are surrounded by defining objects and scenes, but today’s digital natives are arguably defined by the apps and background image on their smartphones. Mobile phones are flat, black, impersonal products of capitalism, with which users frequently forge deeply emotional bonds. Paintings of them may then be seen as a subversive form of portraiture.
In each of my phone portraits, the device is scaled up, desaturated, and features a reflection or silhouette of its user. Each is larger than life, but also a pale imitation, the shadow of its self. / On a personal note, my parents have always resisted the lure of new technology, and so own simple Nokias.