HERSOID's digital mosaic works ask the same question that drives his traditional painting practice: can we trust what we think we saw? Working by hand — tracing source images into complex matrices, displacing grid structures through deliberate shifts in position and transparency — HERSOID subjects the intimate moment to the same epistemological pressure he applies to the archival figure in his paintings. Every compositional decision is made manually. This is craft operating under different constraints, not algorithm. Signal/Witness No. 01 The stamps and catalogue numbers are mirrored, inverted, half-legible — as if the filing system itself has lost confidence in what it's trying to contain. Was something was processed here in May 1935? Something was assigned a value of four pence. Whatever it was, the archive couldn't quite bring itself to look at it directly. The grid fractures the image at the point of contact — the moment the document most needs to be clear is precisely where the transmission breaks down. Ninety years of institutional distance and the signal still arrives compromised, still warm, still insisting on itself despite everything the paperwork tried to do with it. Catalogued. Mirrored. Unresolved. Still 1935 somewhere in the seams.
Deeper reading
Signal/Witness: On the Digital Works of HERSOID There is a question that runs through all of HERSOID's work, whether oil on canvas or pixel on screen: can we trust what we think we saw? His paintings are drawn from the vernacular archive of anonymous found photographs, atmospherically loaded moments and the cataloguing and analysis of mundane or magical moments. They have always operated at the threshold between evidence and doubt. The digital mosaic works extend this inquiry into new territory, but the question remains identical. Working by hand - tracing source images into triangular matrices, or displacing grid structures through deliberate shifts in position and transparency - HERSOID subjects the intimate moment to the same epistemological pressure he applies to the archival figure. The process is not algorithmic. Every decision about where a tile slips, where colour bleeds across a threshold, where recognition begins its collapse into abstraction, is a compositional judgment. This is craft operating under a different set of constraints, but craft nonetheless. The subject matter here - lovers kissing, desire made briefly, vulnerably visible is a departure from the more politically charged or critical works he has previously made. The intimate moment is perhaps the defining subject of the vernacular photographic archive, the image people actually kept, the image that carries the most freight of memory, longing and reconstruction. These digital works add a further dimension: they include the images that historically didn't make it into the family album, the desires that the archive suppressed or simply failed to witness. In this sense they are more archival than the archive itself - loaded with the weight of what gets preserved and what gets erased. The distortion process maps directly onto how intimacy actually lives in memory. We do not remember these moments cleanly. We reconstruct them from fragments, from frequencies, from the approximate. The mosaic works enact this - the image is present but under pressure, legible and dissolving simultaneously, hovering at the point where recognition surrenders to something more like feeling than fact. Borges, a persistent presence in Hersey's thinking, understood that the most ordinary encounter contains recursive, vertiginous depth. A kiss is nothing. A kiss is everything. By breaking the intimate image into its smallest constituent units of colour and geometry and reassembling them into something that oscillates between signal and noise, Hersey performs the same operation Borges performed on the short story: revealing the cosmological inside the mundane, the infinite inside the overlooked. These works do not resolve the question they ask. That is precisely the point. Hersey's practice, across all its forms, is an extended meditation on the limits of witness - and on what remains when the image, like memory itself, begins to come apart at the seams.