The Afterlife of Street Art
Emergent Surfaces is a photographic series that shifts attention away from street art as a finished act, and towards what happens after. Rather than documenting murals at their most complete or legible, this work looks at the gradual erosion of posters, paint, and pasted imagery as they are weathered, torn, covered, and reworked over time.
Working across Melbourne’s CBD laneways, I photographed moments where surfaces had begun to break down—where fragments of images overlap, dissolve, or detach from their original context. Faces become textures, typography slips into abstraction, and compositions emerge unintentionally through processes of removal as much as creation
What interests me in these encounters is not simply decay, but transformation. These surfaces operate as sites of continual revision, shaped by many hands and forces: artists, passers-by, weather, and time. In this sense, authorship becomes dispersed, and the image itself is no longer fixed, but contingent and unstable.
The photographs in this series are not constructed. Each composition was found—an encounter with a moment that is already in the process of disappearing. This temporality is central to the work. The images captured here are not permanent features of the city, but brief configurations that will continue to shift, degrade, or vanish altogether.
This project sits within my broader practice exploring the materiality of transience, and how impermanence is embedded in both environments and lived experience.
