Phantasmal Gallery
Phantasmal Gallery
Charlie
Cole
ARTIST · URBAN NIGHTMARE · MAY 2026
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The Hand That Feeds
Polymer Clay, MDF
2025
32cm x 5cm x 58cm
The Hand That Feeds explores the fragmentation of identity under systems of instruction and control, using layered road signage and distorted figurative relief to create a body that is both assembled and misaligned. A forward-facing face is paired with a second profile that simultaneously reads as an arm, collapsing distinctions between body, function, and surface. The work draws on the visual language of urban signage, warnings, instructions, and coded colour systems, embedding them within the figure as both structure and skin. These elements obscure as much as they reveal, suggesting a subject shaped by external information rather than internal coherence. Within the context of urban horror, the work reflects a condition in which the self is constructed through layers of external guidance, producing a body that is regulated, legible, and functional, yet increasingly disjointed and difficult to fully inhabit.
A Little Bit About The Artist
A Statement From The Artist
Anchored by a more traditionally figurative, yet nonetheless surreal, sculptural backbone, my practice blends anatomical realism with digital corruption and road safety iconography to explore themes surrounding the veneration of perfection and the performativity of self. Many of my sculptures depict subjects whose obsessive pursuit of certainty, correctness, and social perfection has led them to reject failure, vulnerability, and emotional risk. In doing so, they begin to frame passivity and restraint as morally virtuous, treating self-expression as something managed, rehearsed, or theatrically performed rather than sincerely felt. Traffic cones, warning symbols, merit-like badges, and bureaucratic affirmations recur throughout the work, forming a symbolic language of caution, spectacle, and control. These familiar visual codes converge in an almost post-human amalgam of administrative instruction; bodies reshaped by fear, optimisation, and the pressure to become perfectly safe and socially legible.
Do you like scary movies? And if so which ones?
I'm a big fan of horror movies, especially body horror films like Videodrome, Under The Skin, and Suspiria, as well as more psychological horror films such as The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and Eraserhead.
Who or what is the biggest influence in your practice?
From an aesthetic perspective, the biggest influences on my practice are road safety iconography and plant anatomy. Since I cannot drive for medical reasons, road signs have always held an abstract, endearingly vague quality for me, reading more like contemporary hieroglyphs than functional instructions. Emerging from the ground at the edges of roads, often surrounded by vegetation, they began to feel like a kind of 'urban foliage' - artificial growths that signal the steady expansion of human systems into the natural world. Alongside this, I have a long-standing interest in botanical anatomy, regularly studying plant structures and forms as sculptural reference. The visual symbiosis between these two influences, organic growth and imposed systems, has become a guiding principle in my work, informing both its aesthetic language and its exploration of how environments shape the body.
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