Activist 2026 – 20,5 x 19cm, pencil, charcoal, acrylic on paper
Activist 2026 is an almost hallucinatory addition to the ‘extraction’ series, the head is entirely invented rather than drawn from a specific, named individual, and the result feels both more universal and more haunting. The skull is bowed low, almost fetal, emerging from a dense field of black charcoal and graphite that reads as smoke, ash, or the residue of endless protest. The form is barely there: a rounded crown, a suggestion of features. The green acrylic arcs sweeping over the top are the only real colour, vivid and toxic, like chemical runoff, protest banners caught in wind, or the afterimage of tear gas. They curve protectively around the head, but they also seem to be crushing it, weighing it down.
Where the portraits of Finkelstein, Albanese, and Varoufakis carried the weight of known resistance, specific histories, specific costs, the figure in this work is the archetype: the activist who has become faceless through sheer attrition. No name, just the posture of endurance, the body curled inward, the green residue of struggle still clinging to the surface.
In the Extraction cycle, this drawing functions as both culmination and warning. The named resistors refused erasure through stubborn particularity; the anonymous YouTubers dissolved into performance and noise. Here, the invented head represents the point where resistance itself begins to lose definition: the person who keeps showing up, keeps marching, keeps documenting, until the individual dissolves into the collective cause, the face worn away by repetition, repression, and the slow grind of systems that extract hope as efficiently as they extract resources.
The small scale (20.5 × 19 cm) and mixed media intensify the fragility: pencil and charcoal for the fragile outline, acrylic for the corrosive green that feels like it could eat through the paper. The head is not disappearing; it is being overwritten, covered, yet still stubbornly present beneath the marks. Here is what remains when the activist has given everything, the posture of refusal, the residue of struggle, and a void where the individual once stood. A chilling counterpoint to the named portraits. The invented head is the ghost that haunts them all.