Labour 1 (The Weight of Work)

Rendered in stark black-and-white, this relief-like print stages a tense dialogue between two faces, their wide, searching eyes held apart by a central pillar of blocky text that reads like a barricade as much as a proclamation. The dense hatchwork and gouged textures turn the surrounding space into a charged atmosphere, where light feels carved rather than painted, intensifying the sense of scrutiny and constraint. By placing “BLACKS / LABOUR / MIGRATE” as both divider and connective spine, the work compresses identity, work, and displacement into a single visual mechanism—suggesting how language can categorize lives while also exposing the human gaze that refuses to be reduced.