Look below to see beyond

This week, I’ve been thinking about surface

How it shapes influence, how it holds power, and what happens when we mistake it for depth.

In the arts, we’re taught to index for truth. Meaning. Alignment.

As if love, identity, and perception should all point inwards.

As if the goal is to become a perfect crystal.

Clarity from surface to core, neat atomic rows, no distortion.

But that’s not the human condition.

That’s a rock.

And a rock can’t play the guitar.

Enjoy…

Surface as Strategy

Ghostwriting the Visible

"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."

That’s from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. He understood that modern life was shifting. From lived experience to ownership. From ownership to image. From reality to performance.

What we see becomes what we believe.
What we can’t see, we forget.
And most of what we interact with now is surface.

That doesn’t make it meaningless.
It just makes it fast.

Marshall McLuhan called this out in a different way. "The medium is the message." A thought on a canvas carries a different weight than the same thought in a tweet. A sentence on a billboard hits differently than the same sentence whispered in a gallery.

The material matters. The context shapes everything.

Graffiti writing was one of the first disciplines within art that I took seriously. Walking through East London, I realised that some of the most committed artists displaying work weren’t in galleries and had no intention of being there. Their work moved differently. Quietly. Illegally. It wasn’t about recognition. It was about placement, reach, risk, and rhythm.

They were building what I started to call ghost infrastructure. Not just decoration, but an entire visual system beneath the one we’re shown. Names stitched into the edges of buildings, rooftops, fire escapes, train tunnels. Hidden architecture mapped through repetition.

It’s a system. Built on codes, form, and exposure.
No nameplate, no bio, no price tag. Just discipline and volume.

The highest respect didn’t go to the most complex work.
It went to the simplest tag, in the hardest place, done the most.

That discipline doesn’t survive well in institutions.
It’s not supposed to.

10 Foot’s recent show in London was shut down prematurely. Not because of the work, but because someone tagged a slur nearby, on Crown property. It wasn’t connected to the show, but it didn’t matter. The gallery was close enough, and the association was enough. Aesthetically, culturally, the space was punished.

That’s what happens when you blur the lines of permission.
You don’t have to break the rule. You just have to resemble it.

When people talk about surface in art, it’s often in terms of polish, technique, luxury. But surface can also mean access. Regulation. Who gets to touch it, alter it, claim it.

That’s why Crown property can’t be marked.
That’s why magazines control what beauty is.
That’s why brands have learned to use surface as power.

Virgil Abloh didn’t redesign the t-shirt; he redesigned the environment around it. Put a plain tee on a boutique shelf, it’s a product. Put it on a plinth in a gallery, it becomes an object. The cost doesn’t come from the materials. It comes from the message.

That logic has scaled. Zara copies it. Glossier mirrors it.
Surface becomes brand.
Surface becomes value.
Surface becomes law.

That’s why I work the way I do.

When I put my work in public, it’s not decoration. It’s a field of negotiation. People look. People reflect. Some try to steal it. It’s alive.

The Vogue mirror was placed outside. Not protected. Not controlled. It was a premium object in a low-permission zone. Someone tried to take it. A lot of people saw it. That was the point.

Surface isn’t shallow.
It’s just fast.

It moves ahead of language. Ahead of theory. Ahead of proof.

When I want something to last, I use linen.
When I want it to move, I use the street.
When I want it to provoke, I use the mirror.

It’s not performance. It’s not branding.
It’s just how different surfaces behave.

And if you’re not choosing your surfaces with intent,
You’re still performing.
You’re just doing it for someone else.

Camouflage and Control

Strategic Invisibility in a World Obsessed with Image

"Visibility is a trap."

Foucault wrote that in Discipline and Punish, describing how the panopticon doesn’t need a guard to function. Just the threat of being watched is enough to make people police themselves.

Once I understood that, I stopped asking why people hide. I started paying closer attention to how power reveals, or doesn’t reveal itself. Visibility isn’t always an advantage. Sometimes, it’s how they get you.

Surveillance isn’t just about cameras. It’s about expectation. About recognisability. About what your face or your style signals. About how easily someone can decode you. And about whether your presence threatens the stability of the space you’re in.

That’s why I spent most of my early career anonymous. Changing names. Changing cities. Keeping a distance between the work and the person. Not because I was afraid of being seen, but because I didn’t want the wrong people thinking they understood what I was doing.

Trevor Paglen helped clarify that instinct. In his Limit Telephotography series, he uses high-range lenses to photograph secret government sites, data centres, prisons, military operations, right at the edge of legal visibility. What’s powerful isn’t just what he shows. It’s how he gets it. The image is not just a record, it’s a method.

Those hidden sites don’t look like secrets. They look like beige warehouses. Hospitals. Office parks. When a prison is hidden well, it looks like a school. That’s the brilliance of camouflage. It’s not invisibility. It’s normality.

MindGeek’s offices are the same. They run the adult content empire from a generic concrete block in Montreal. No logo. No drama. Just silence. That’s not oversight. That’s design.

When power wants to disappear, it gets boring.

That logic works in fashion, too. Military uniforms-once designed to erase the individual-become streetwear. The symbolism flips. Now they signal knowledge. Toughness. Autonomy. A way of surviving the urban terrain. A way of saying: I know how to move here.

You’re not wearing fabric. You’re wearing a signal system.

Camouflage is how you say just enough. Camouflage is how you survive scrutiny.

When I talk about control, I’m not talking about brute force. I’m talking about architecture. What you’re allowed to place. Where you’re allowed to speak. Who gets heard. Who gets flagged. What gets erased.

For me, the work is always a negotiation between visibility and protection. What I give. What I withhold. What I encrypt. And sometimes, what I plant just to be misunderstood.

That’s part of the camouflage, too.

Sometimes visibility is necessary.
Sometimes it’s bait.

Sometimes the performance isn’t for them.
It’s for the people who know how to read between it.

The Illusion of Authenticity

Don’t Call It Real. It’s Just Working.

Authenticity is treated like a virtue. Something you either have or you don’t. But I think of it more like formatting. A way of making yourself legible.

Instagram taught me that.

It rewards a particular kind of intimacy. Not too polished. Not too raw. Just enough performance to appear spontaneous. Just enough revelation to feel real. The appearance of honesty becomes more valuable than the thing itself.

That’s not a glitch. That’s the frame. The system doesn’t want your truth. It wants a feeling of truth, formatted for repetition.

You start to adapt. You round off the edges. You shave the silences. You simplify what can’t be read quickly. Eventually the performance becomes habit. You stop deciding what to share. You just share what works.

I’ve had to shift identities a lot. Changing names. Moving between countries. Sometimes for safety. Sometimes for clarity. Sometimes just to stay mobile. It never felt like pretending. It felt like tuning the instrument.

There’s a line from Donna Haraway I come back to often. She said she’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Not divine. Not mythical. Just built. Self-authored.

The longer I do this, the more I understand the value of choosing the mask. The one that lets you speak. The one that protects the part of you that doesn’t need to be witnessed.

When I place mirrors in public, I see how that instinct plays out in others. People pause. Adjust themselves. Take the photo. Caption it. It’s not vanity. It’s choreography. They’re composing their reflection. Projecting back a version they can carry into the world.

I’ve seen people whisper to themselves in front of these mirrors. No camera. No pose. Just stillness. Like they saw something they weren’t expecting. Or something they forgot they were carrying.

That moment is why the mirror matters.

Because the mirror doesn’t show the truth. It shows what’s ready to be seen.

And the surface becomes part of that readiness.

The mirror is a stage. The caption is a script. The mask is the message.

People call that manipulation. I call it authorship.

I don’t curate my identity.
I direct it.

The mask isn’t hiding me.
It’s the only thing I ever built carefully.

Symbols, Spectacle, and Perception

What We See Is What We Obey

Symbols don’t explain themselves. They don’t argue. They don’t ask. They just appear. And the world arranges itself around them.

A logo. A check mark. A headline. A hashtag. They reduce meaning into something immediate. And in that compression, they gain force.

Roland Barthes said that myth doesn’t lie-it simplifies. A photograph of a soldier saluting becomes a symbol of loyalty. But behind it is the war. Behind it is the instruction. Myth replaces complexity with legibility. That’s what makes it efficient. That’s what makes it useful.

Walter Benjamin saw it too. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the aura of the original disappears. The image becomes a copy. The copy becomes a replacement. You no longer remember what it meant. You only remember where you saw it.

A meme carries more social weight than a manifesto. A crop of a video tells you what happened. A quote graphic trains your opinion. The format gets there first. The symbol wins the room before the idea even enters.

That’s the spectacle. It’s not about deception. It’s about substitution.

Disinformation doesn’t spread through chaos. It spreads through clarity. It offers fast certainty. It removes your need to interpret.

That’s how a symbol gains power. It gets familiar. It gets repeated. And the moment it feels natural, it no longer needs proof. It just becomes truth.

I think about that when I make work. What kind of typeface to use. What kind of language to risk. Where the mirror gets placed. What label I assign to a surface.

Because I know that if a single word is placed on a reflective field, it will be absorbed. Not just seen. Felt. The person in front of it won’t walk away unchanged.

That’s not style. That’s architecture.

Mark Lombardi understood this better than most. He didn’t scream about corruption. He diagrammed it. Turned it into line and angle. He made networks of influence visible through visual logic. He proved that you don’t have to make work loud to make it undeniable.

I don’t want to fight the symbols that shape us. I want to learn how they work.

And once I know how they work, I want to build better ones.

Surface as Love, Surface as Truth

What Appears Is What We Feel

Sometimes the surface is enough. Sometimes the surface is everything.

There’s a kind of intimacy that only happens when something is fully visible. Not explained. Not defended. Just shown. Quietly. With no demand to be more than it is.

That’s what I’m reaching for when I make my work.

Not to flatter. Not to critique. Just to reflect. To let a moment pass through with its shape intact.

Most of the time, my mirrors are treated like a trap. A site of vanity. A mechanism of self-surveillance. But it doesn’t have to be. A mirror doesn’t follow you. It doesn’t force you. It just receives.

And that’s a kind of truth I think we’re losing.

Alan Watts said trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. I don’t think the point is to define anything. I think the point is to witness what already exists.

We talk about love like it’s something buried. But sometimes, it’s just in how someone moves. How the light sits on their skin. How long they pause before answering.

Not all sacredness is hidden. Not all beauty needs a backstory.

Some things glow right away. And that glow isn’t proof of simplicity. It’s proof of generosity.

I remember someone looking into one of my mirrors and saying something under their breath. No pose. No phone. No audience. Just presence. Like they saw something they weren’t expecting. Or remembered something they thought they’d left behind.

There was no icon on that mirror. No phrase. Just steel and sky and reflection.

That held more than anything I could have added.

Susan Sontag wrote that to photograph something is to appropriate it. To try to possess it. But some surfaces resist that. Some things only make sense when you stand near them with nothing in your hands.

That’s how I want my work to operate.

I don’t want to explain everything. I want to build a place where something can be felt without being captured.

That’s what the mirror offers. A moment of clarity that doesn’t need commentary.

The more I do this, the less I believe in excavation. I don’t want to dig. I want to stay still long enough for the surface to tell me what’s true.

Poets Corner

Taking A Dive

Trying to border a picture
containing everything
Leaves me
with not enough frame in the world.

Not enough for the surface
to the bottom of an ocean
Not enough to take in
all that’s in between.

Whilst I take you for a dive
to the bottom of an ocean
Whilst I lead you
to the bottom of a screen.

Trying to explain all that’s up there
at the surface of things.

- Thomas May

For clarity.

The mask I’m making isn’t hiding me.

It’s the only thing I’m building authentically.

Love you loads

R

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