Public sector 2026 – 30 x 24cm, acrylic on canvas
“We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths.” – George Monbiot
Public Sector 2026 is a compact, almost claustrophobic abstraction that feels like a pressure cooker for the Extraction series, one that internalises the themes of systemic decay and enforced depletion without a single literal figure or symbol in sight.
The 30 × 24 cm canvas is a battlefield of layers: thick, dripping acrylic in fiery reds, acid yellows, necrotic blacks, and bruised greys, built up and then punished, scraped, dragged, allowed to sag and pool like structural failure made material. The composition suggests a grid or framework at its core: vertical and horizontal lines (perhaps echoes of the surveillance grids in your citizen works) that are fractured, melting, overrun by chaotic blobs and rivulets. The reds and yellows bleed downward like rust or corrosion eating through steel, while the blacks clot and smother, turning what might have been a stable infrastructure into a rotting scaffold. The surface is alive with texture, impasto ridges catch light like exposed rebar, scraped areas reveal raw canvas beneath like peeled-away facades, and the drips evoke slow leaks from a system too compromised to hold itself together.
In the broader Extraction arc, this piece bridges the individual depletion (heads, YouTubers) with the territorial (citizen grids): the public sector as the ultimate extracted entity, its infrastructure (roads, schools, health) turned into raw material for privatisation. No clean lines, no balanced composition, just the slow, inevitable sag toward entropy.