All Hope Abandon, Ye That Enter

This self-portrait is part of my ‘Black and Blue’ series, a body of work shaped by grief and loss. Across this series, I use self-portraiture to move beyond direct representation and towards something more symbolic and introspective, trying to visualise the emotional states that sit beneath language; disorientation, dread, absence, and the slow, unstable process of trying to rebuild meaning. These works function as a kind of visual diary, made from within that experience.
 
The title of the drawing is taken directly from the text beneath the figure, which felt significant because it seemed to articulate the emotional register of the work. The collaged pages are not incidental. As with the wider series, they bring their own philosophical weight into the composition, creating a tension between intimate experience and inherited ideas about how life should be understood or endured. The self-portrait emerges through that surface, held within it and resisting it at the same time.
 
Within the ‘Black and Blue’ series, this artwork sits among a group of drawings that confronts the unspoken and often contradictory realities of grief. It is concerned with the internal landscape of loss, but also with what it means to keep going when reality has been fundamentally altered. By drawing directly onto antique texts, I am able to place personal pain into conversation with older structures of meaning, not to resolve that tension, but to remain inside it. The result is a work that holds emotional fragility and endurance in the same space.
 
30X42cm, 2026, Ballpoint pen on collaged pages from ‘The Art of Life’ by Havelock Ellis (1929).
 
In a handmade UV resistant, anti-reflective black frame.