With the Masters coming to a close in September it is time to consider what we will show as part of our exhibition at City & Guilds London. I learnt so much from installing The Pale Soft Palaces of Death and my thesis reflected upon this gradual emergence of a post-medium practice grounded in installation, material relation, and duration. Here’s an except from my thesis outlining an idea for the new work::

A continuous live feed from the south coast, looking outward towards the horizon and projected into the gallery, while simultaneously streamed through my website. The horizon signifies futurity, aspiration, and the possibility of what lies beyond, yet it is also an optical illusion that continually recedes as one approaches it. In this sense, it becomes a figure for unfulfilled longing and the cruel optimism that runs throughout this thesis. The feed would continue uninterrupted through night, storms, changing weather, extended periods in which little appears to happen, and the occasional technical failure. This durational emptiness is central to the work. Through prolonged looking and suspended action, anticipation, projection, anxiety, and boredom begin to emerge. The viewer becomes sensitised not to an event, but to the condition of watchfulness itself. Drawing upon the visual language of surveillance infrastructure while displacing its conventional function, the camera no longer secures territory or produces actionable information. Instead, it performs a continuous and unresolved act of looking. The work operates as a form of affective surveillance: a technological system registering atmosphere, duration, and the psychological textures of living under conditions of precarity, overwhelm, and diffuse threat. Yet it also remains attentive to resilience, care, and the labour involved in sustaining forms of life under such conditions. Alongside the moving image, I am considering painting and sculpture as components of the installation. The figure of the dog recurs as a symbol of protection, guardianship, and vigilance. Territorial and watchful, it occupies an ambiguous space between care and defence.

In developing this work, I became interested in the metaphorical relationship between territorial borders and psychic ones. The live feed of the south coast borrows from the visual language of surveillance, yet its subject is less the coastline itself than the conditions of watchfulness it evokes. I found myself returning repeatedly to the question of fear and the ways it becomes politically organised. Borders are not natural facts but political constructions, shaped by power, resource distribution, and anxiety. At the level of subjectivity, similar dynamics emerge. The psyche establishes its own borders, producing a sense of sovereignty through vigilance, defence, and self protection. The work explores these resonances between the political and the personal, asking how fear shapes both collective attitudes towards belonging and exclusion, and individual experiences of vulnerability and hypervigilance. These questions of fear, protection, and belonging are never fully resolved; rather, they persist, returning in different forms across personal and collective life. As Sadeq Rahimi writes, “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something returns” (Rahimi 21). Rather than resolving these tensions, art becomes a space where they may linger. Positions are not fixed within narrative but dispersed across forms – text, image, object, and duration – allowing absence to operate as a structuring force.