RCA 2025 Graduate Show

19.06.25 - 22.06.25

The Politics of Pixelation

The work I contributed to the graduate show explores concepts surrounding pixelation, fragmentation, and replication. The pixel is a unit of perception, and every image can be reduced to its pixels.

Changing the resolution of an image changes the impression on the viewer. Using the software TouchDesigner, my practice engages with the absolute laws of code, applying and expanding them into concepts and principles which can be more malleable. This makes the pixel political. To elaborate, Vilém Flusser has speculated that the pixel is a threshold between analogue and presence. I questioned how I could bring this digital ontology into the material. If I were to build a replica of this universe, I would reduce every element to the equivalent of an atom, a pixel.

The Box as a Boundary

My installation, Tesselate, is comprised of charcoal suspended in resin blocks. The blocks serve not only as objects but as representations: units of meaning that represent the structure of a pixel, a unit, or an atom. The blocks hold the potential to be endlessly rearranged. I was drawn to their tactile versatility as well as their capacity to be both a fragment and a whole. Within each block, there are worlds within worlds, infinite variations held within a universal form. There is a kind of finality to charcoal as a material, burning the wood until the fire exhausts itself. In this way, breaking structure down is not towards the end of meaning, but the beginning of construction.

I see the pixel is a code-bound filter, a constraint on vision which I aimed to represent through sculpture and moving image. In Deleuze’s terms, the pixel is a site of difference, of infinite modulation. My work aims to pause this modulation and give form to the threshold where perception and abstraction meet.

The Making of Black Fish

Black Fish is a floor sculpture made from CNC-milled polyurethane, coated in epoxy resin. The form is based on an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile from the Mesozoic era. Inspired by the ichthyosaur fossil displayed at the Natural History Museum, which was discovered mid-labour, the sculpture explores preservation and memory through fossilisation. Like the Ichthyosaur in the Natural History Museum, my ichthyosaur has also been split in two.

My practice continues to question what it means to be co-author with the machine.

Using code to instruct the subtractive sculpting process, the piece reflects on the intersection of digital fabrication, palaeontology, and speculative evolution. These itchyosaurs are organisms which habitate in my pixelated universe, which dances between the boundaries of europia and dystopia.

Printmaking: repetition and variation

This series of risograph prints explores how repetition, rather than producing sameness, generates difference. Each layer of ink misregisters slightly, introducing unexpected textures, distortions, and tonal shifts. For me, risoprinting is a process that mimics memory, which becomes abstracted as we age and with each recollection; everything is stained with nostalgia.

Risograph printing is a type of printmaking which requires colour separation into CMYK on Photoshop, then each layer is printed separately. Much like a glitch or an echo, each print reflects the original, but also transforms it.

In today’s digital era, repetition and replication are everywhere, especially across social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. This makes it all the more important to ask: whose perspective is being repeated? Whose narratives are being amplified, and whose are being left out?