A yearning for lost security (1st version), oil on board, 35.5 x 43 cm
A yearning for lost security (2nd version), oil on canvas, 45 x 50 cm
The voyager of thought, oil on plywood, 50 x 60 cm
Tales of progress and ruin, oil on board, 35.5 x 43 cm
An act of extreme nostalgia (for an Imperial past), oil on board, 35.5 x 43 cm
The compulsion to self-design, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm
The afterlife of sovereign power. oil on plywood panel, 50 x 60 cm
Tales of progress and ruin, pencil on paper, 24 x 32 cm
Potential histories in the making, pencil on paper, 20 x 30 cm
Voice of blood, pencil on paper, 12 x 15 cm
A yearning for lost security
These paintings and drawings form part of an exploration into a critical engagement with AI. Emerging from a process that brings together philosophical ‘prompts’ and found imagery, the works test how abstract thought might be translated, misread or transformed by non-human systems. Simultaneously beguiling and banal — compelling and oddly empty — the resulting hybrid images are translated through a forensic painterly process, or through drawing, with a trace of the philosophical content remaining in the title.
The works reference AI not simply as a tool, but as a form of non-human intelligence that unsettles human-centred ideas of creativity, authorship and perception, a decentring that began with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. For Freud, dreams offer a privileged route into this unconscious life, but only through distortion, displacement and disguise, reshaping its disturbing contents into acceptable forms that allow sleep to continue.
Like dreams, AI images act as a kind of screen: they disclose our collective desires, anxieties, and contradictions embedded within algorithmic systems — while also distorting them — producing images that are compelling, strange and unstable. In doing so, they hold our attention while obscuring the capitalist systems of extraction, surveillance and optimisation that AI is both dependent on and helps to intensify.