Series: Funeral Blues (first completed work; numbered 7 in sequence)

Year: 2026

A deep, all‑black field holds a congregation of faces that emerge from the surface like a memory pressing through cloth. Each visage is individually modelled and stitched into place, their blankness refusing private grief and insisting instead on a communal, anonymous presence. The black floating frame isolates the work from its surroundings, turning the canvas into a void where mourning accumulates and the ordinary markers of expression are stripped away.

The piece stages absence as company: the sewn faces gather as unseen witnesses to a loss the viewer cannot enter, evoking the formal restraint and quiet devastation of Auden’s poem without illustration. Tactile and somber, the work asks the gallery to hold silence as a material—dense, layered, and inexorably human.

Medium: Mixed media on stretched canvas; hand‑formed faces sewn into surface; black floating frame