Still Life, 2026 — Rush Drayton

By Rush Drayton

Sculpture · 48 × 59 × 20 cm

Still Life explores the uncomfortable truth that we find beauty in death, provided it isn't our own. The sculpture questions power dynamics around empathy, how we determine which bodies deserve compassion and which become mere objects. Inverting the traditional composition of 17th-19th century still life paintings, positioning the human figure in that same position of powerlessness: aestheticised, stripped of agency, arranged for our gaze. The work doesn't rely on shock or violence. Instead, it dismantles human exceptionalism by reversing our expected role from observer to observed. When we be