Inspired by John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm painting of Melbourne’s peak-hour, the Crowd series unfolds as an extended reflection on how individuals inhabit collective space – both physical and digital – and how behaviour shifts within conditions of anonymity.
The works originate from single photographic frames, captured within moments of gathering: streets, sport events, sites of movement. Each image is enlarged beyond its intended resolution, pushed to the edge of its technical capacity until detail collapses. Faces disappear. Bodies fragment. What once functioned as documentation enters the abstract territory. Through this process of visual erosion, the photograph is no longer a record of who was present, but a field of relations – densities, gaps, gestures, proximities.
Rendered in black and white and transferred onto paper, these reduced forms operate in a state of suspended identity. They are neither portraits nor abstractions, but something in between: traces of human presence that refuse recognition. This anonymity becomes a critical condition. Within it, the works ask how we navigate the tension between being seen and remaining concealed, between participating in a collective and retaining a sense of self.
The crowd, in this context, is not simply a gathering of bodies but a psychological and social construct. It offers both protection and permission. Historically, anonymity within crowds has enabled acts of solidarity, protest, but also racial slurs. It also creates conditions in which accountability can dissolve. The individual, absorbed into the mass, becomes less visible and, at times, less responsible.
This dynamic extends powerfully into digital space. Online environments replicate and intensify the logic of the crowd: users operate behind screens, often their identity is obscured. Here, anonymity can help the expression, but it can also enable forms of agressive behaviour. Trolling, harassment, and doxing emerge within this terrain as expressions of power performed without direct consequence. The removal of the detailed face, the voice, the physical presence – elements stripped away in these artworks – mirrors the conditions under which such behaviours proliferate.
In the Crowd series, the loss of visual detail becomes a metaphor for this shifting ethical landscape. When identity is obscured, what remains are actions and their impact, detached from the person who initiated them. The works consider how easily the boundaries between private and public, self and other, can blur.
