Citizens 2 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
Citizens 2 2026 is a raw, urgent expansion of the citizen motif, a drawing that shifts from isolated figures to a dense, seething crowd, yet keeps the same chilling sense of vulnerability and extraction under an unseen gaze.
The composition is panoramic and chaotic: a swarm of scribbled forms clustered in what feels like a street or square, facing a vague horizon or focal point, perhaps a stage, a barricade, or the site of tragedy. The figures are small, huddled, some standing in tight groups, others isolated in the mass, all rendered in loose, frantic pencil marks that suggest the jitter of movement, murmur, or the static of surveillance footage.
Overhead, arching lines, wires, streetlights, or implied drone paths, frame the scene like a net, casting long, distorted shadows that stretch and warp the assembly below. This drawing captures the energy of collective resistance, huge crowds marching in cities like Minneapolis and across America, protesting ICE agents’ presence and the violence they represent, yet it refuses to romanticise. The crowd is not heroic or unified; it is fragile, exposed, easily dispersed by wind, police, or time. Shadows overlap and extend, betraying time of day (early morning light? Floodlights?), direction of movement, and emotional state, turning the pavement into a carrier of intelligence: every scribble a potential node for facial recognition, heat mapping, or predictive algorithms. Palantir’s AI tools for drone targeting in Gaza or its police contracts come to mind here, the gathering is not just seen; it is parsed, profiled, preempted.
In the Extraction series, this is a necessary multiplication: the single citizen pinned to the grid becomes many, but the depletion is the same. The panoptic gaze turns the march into data: location stamped, clustering analysed, anomalies flagged. The pencil marks are swift, almost violent, scratched, overlapped, erased in places, capturing the precariousness of the moment: this is not a triumphant assembly, but a vulnerable one, exposed to the elements and the overhead eye.