Through the glass

First draft.

Artist’s Statement

Through the glass

Through the glass explores the materiality of the digital imageworld; a space where images fracture, pixelate, and degrade, yet continue to tempt us. We are coerced through our screens to inhabit a curated half-existence, an algorithmic reality that pulls, tempts, and manipulates our children at an unstable stage of growing. How can the real world compete with something so luminous, free from rules, and embracing of rebellion.

These digital compositions reveal a duality of loss: the erosion of identity and the absence of presence within the physical world. The self is no longer fixed but fragmented across platforms, filtered through layers of distortion and performance. The work becomes a conversation between two states of being, presence and absence.

The images are pushed to the point of corruption. The data is unstable, it can break, colours can bleed, pixels misfire. In their exposed state, they reveal something unconscious, what these images are made of, and attempts to ask why they are so powerfully idolised.

She is lost in this world. I cannot reach her. I cannot guide her through this unstable terrain; the journey is singular, immersive, and beyond my control. I can only witness the drift, the slow buffering of presence, as she disappears further into the imageworld. I wish I could pull her back from the wonderland, a space that appears to offer freedom, yet is seeded with traps, loops, and invisible architectures of control.

There is a clear parallelled narrative with Lewis Carroll’s exploration of childhood and quest for identity, a text that has always carried a darker resonance for me. As with Carroll’s world, this one is illogical, disorienting, and quietly unsettling, a place where scale shifts, rules dissolve, and the self becomes difficult to locate. But here, the rabbit hole is digital, and the fall is endless