Abduction

Standing on the platform at Sloane Square one evening, I found myself looking across the tracks at a dozen or so passengers on the other side, waiting for their train—motionless as statues, transfixed by their phones. We've all seen it, but for some reason I felt an internal shutter-click that evening, and the image stayed with me.

At first, I thought about replicating the scene exactly—the entire platform and its passengers, either as a sculpture or in XR. We built a detailed 3D model of the station but it was too literal, so we inverted it, placing the figures in space as if they were falling or suspended. It was visually interesting, but it felt like set design.

I put it aside.

Over time, I began to recognize the connection of the hovering figures to earlier work, particularly a series I'd made called RCVR, which explored alien possession. It also connected to something more personal—four years of cancer treatment that I experienced as a kind of medical abduction.

Suddenly I saw those falling, floating figures as abductees caught in a tractor beam.

After months of struggling, the piece knew where it wanted to take me.

Replacing the group scene, I focused on a single figure—isolated, vulnerable, raised upward by an invisible force in the form of a green cone of light. And instead of showing this figure in one position, I made the decision to show her in eight stages of ascent—by turns terrified, shocked, surprised, extracted without warning from the life she knows, and dragged into the unknown.

It's said that every work of art is a form of self portrait. That may be true, because I recognized her immediately.