Allies 2026 – 21 x 30cm, pencil on paper
The global chaos that has unfolded since Trump and Israel illegally attacked Iran is profoundly disturbing, not just to me but to millions of people across the world. This drawing is a reaction to that, spaces registering frantic marks, scraping, erratic movements, escalation of events, power plays, commentators’ shock, fatigue, depletion. So much anxiety in the world over the US and Israel.
The central character’s face has been almost completely erased. You can see the ghost of features, eyes, nose, mouth, but they’ve been rubbed out, leaving just a pale oval. This is the erasure of agency, of rational actors, of the possibility of restraint. The face rubbed out because there’s no one steering, no adults in the room, just reckless escalation.
The hands are sort of shaking, trembling from fear of what comes next, from the recognition that the guardrails are gone, that international law means nothing when empire decides to act. The physical manifestation of global anxiety, of millions watching this happen with no power to prevent it.
The small inset to the top right of the frame contains three figures, the commentators, the YouTubers and alternative news anchors trying to process and analyze while events spiral beyond comprehension. They’re watching, reporting, but they’re small, contained in their little screen, unable to stop what’s unfolding.
That frantic hatching, the erratic movements, the scraped and overworked areas, these are the formal equivalents of escalation, of events moving faster than anyone can process. The drawing tries to register speed, chaos, the overwhelming nature of watching catastrophe unfold through feeds and screens.
“ALLIES” becomes deeply bitter in this context. The US-Israel alliance operating with total impunity, “allied” nations either supporting or being too weak to oppose, the entire architecture of international law and supposed multilateralism revealed as fiction when confronted with raw imperial violence.
The commentators’ shock, fatigue, depletion, this is what the drawing captures. The exhaustion of watching atrocity after atrocity, violation after violation, while the mechanisms that should prevent this do nothing. Alternative media documenting every crime while those crimes continue escalating.
The anxiety radiating from this work is palpable, it’s in every mark, every erasure, every frantic line. Not aesthetic chaos but the registration of actual geopolitical catastrophe, of watching the world tip toward wider war, of feeling powerless in the face of it.