In Collapse, HERSOID shifts from the glossy deceit of mass messaging (as seen in Mismanaged Consent) to a quieter, more intimate form of visual decay. This series presents a set of stark, almost forensic images—crumpled cars wrapped around ghostly tree trunks, a building folding in on itself like a failed thought—drawn with surgical precision and unsettling restraint. It’s as if the artist is cataloguing the aftermath of unseen forces: not disaster as spectacle, but entropy as fact.

What’s striking here is the deliberate incompleteness. Each work feels like a sentence cut off mid-speech. The empty space is doing a lot of the talking. There’s a studied absence of narrative—no flames, no figures, no explicit violence—just the evidence of collapse. And yet, the violence is everywhere, buried in the gouges, the buckling, the broken symmetry. These are not simply ruined objects; they are portraits of structural failure, of systems folding under pressures they were never designed to withstand.

Formally, HERSOID retains his signature blend of analogue draftsmanship and minimal, almost clinical colour—a nod to the documentary impulse of early conceptual artists, but tinged with the cool detachment of postmodern architectural rendering. The influence of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” or Edward Ruscha’s deadpan studies of banal architecture lingers here, but they’re filtered through a Borges-like refusal to deliver context. There is no “before,” only the moment after everything stopped working.

In the broader arc of HERSOID’s oeuvre, Collapse serves as a kind of skeletal underpinning to the louder critiques of Mismanaged Consent and the bureaucratic surrealism of earlier series. It strips away the cultural facade to reveal the raw, twisted infrastructure beneath—a moment of crash without crescendo. If Mismanaged Consent is the lie we’re sold, Collapse is what’s left when the lie folds in on itself.

Together, these works sketch the anatomy of a civilisation quietly coming undone. There is no moralising here, only a cool recognition: even the strongest structures eventually fall.

In this piece from HERSOID’s new series Despondency, the tone shifts—but the critical acuity remains razor-sharp. Gone are the algorithmic overlays and biometric identifiers of Working Under Surveillance. Here, the violence is quieter, more intimate. We see a solitary figure curled into herself, crouched low, boots planted, arms wrapped around her knees, face half-hidden behind a drooping fringe and an exhausted forearm. It’s not so much a portrait as a pose of surrender.

The medium—pencil and wash on what appears to be folded kraft paper—heightens the vulnerability. The creases in the paper read like old scars, or bureaucratic filings folded and forgotten. The colour palette—muted pinks and flesh tones sinking into the grainy brown of the paper—feels both tender and bruised. This isn’t simply a study in sadness; it’s a depiction of a particular kind of emotional attrition: the slow crush of inheriting a broken world.

Thematically, Despondency continues HERSOID’s investigation into power and agency, but now the gaze turns inward. Where earlier works exposed systems of control—facial recognition, datafication, surveillance capitalism—this series explores the psychological toll those systems (and others: ecological collapse, economic precarity, digital overstimulation) exact on younger generations. The absence of technological motifs here doesn’t contradict HERSOID’s usual themes; it deepens them. The system doesn’t need to be visible to be oppressive—it has already seeped into the interior life.

And if we follow HERSOID’s recurring interest in literature (especially Borges), this piece hums with echoes of The Library of Babel or The Garden of Forking Paths—texts haunted by infinity, paralysis, and the absurdity of choice in systems too vast to comprehend. The figure’s crouch suggests a kind of existential refusal, not unlike Bartleby’s: “I would prefer not to.” But it also evokes Kafka—bureaucratic despair, the crushing ambiguity of a world you didn’t ask to be born into and can’t meaningfully change.

Yet what makes this image sing is its restraint. It doesn’t dramatize rage or scream apocalypse. It whispers resignation. The anger has happened already—what’s left is its aftermath: numbness, posture, silence.

In this way, Despondency might be HERSOID’s most haunting work yet—not because it shows us what power does, but what it leaves behind.

HERSOID’s Working Under Surveillance series is a biting, poetic critique of algorithmic oversight and the quiet violence of modern data culture. By overlaying facial recognition markers and alphanumeric IDs onto anachronistic figures—farmhands, gauchos, workers drawn from pastoral or folkloric pasts—the series constructs a visual language that’s both absurd and alarming. It stages a conceptual collision between pre-digital identity and the cold mechanics of contemporary surveillance.

In the second piece, a trio of traditionally dressed rural men—likely Latin American gauchos—stand in casual camaraderie. They seem unaware, or perhaps resigned, as their faces are boxed and triangulated by biometric mapping. Above each head hovers a unique identifier, part bureaucratic gibberish, part dystopian poetry. The work doesn’t simply critique the future—it suggests that history itself is being retrofitted into the grid of surveillance, scanned and filed regardless of its original context.

What’s striking across the series is HERSOID’s use of visual contradiction: the soft textures and linework evoke warmth and nostalgia, while the hard-edged overlays of AI recognition systems cut across the image like a scalpel. This duality foregrounds the absurdity of our era—where everything from innocence to ancestry is fair game for algorithmic scrutiny.

Thematically, Working Under Surveillance asks: What happens to human identity when it is relentlessly abstracted into data? How do we reconcile romanticized images of the past with the reality of digital intrusion? And crucially, how complicit are we in aestheticizing our own loss of privacy?

The series isn’t alarmist—it’s diagnostic. It doesn’t scream rebellion, it mutters resistance. HERSOID’s figures don’t appear oppressed in a theatrical sense; rather, they’re quietly flattened, re-coded, their humanity slowly leaking away under the weight of metadata. And in that subtle erosion lies the series’ true power.

Just in time for the New York solo show happening in June 2025, HERSOID is launching this hard backed 100pp art book, documenting the art and illustration produced and minted on chain over the last few years.

The book will soon be available to buy in the HERSOID shop, but for now read what ChatGPT had to say about this fascinating survey of the artists work…

“Book Jacket Summary: HERSOID: The Art of Nick Hersey

Nick Hersey—working under the alias HERSOID—is one of the sharpest visual satirists to emerge from the British art scene in recent years. Blending deadpan humour, dystopian edge, and surreal precision, his work straddles the absurd and the urgent with an eye always trained on the contradictions of modern life. This monograph is the first comprehensive collection of Hersey’s output, charting a body of work that is as visually striking as it is intellectually provocative.

Hersey’s aesthetic is rooted in a bold graphic language—part propaganda poster, part storybook hallucination—layered with hand-drawn figures, vintage palettes, and bursts of biting text. He draws heavy inspiration from literary figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose influence echoes in Hersey’s recursive logic, philosophical undertones, and fascination with systems that loop and devour themselves. Like Borges, Hersey conjures mazes—only his are constructed of corporate slogans, climate dread, political inertia, and the slow suffocation of individuality in consumer society.

With dark wit and a tone that oscillates between cynical and gleefully irreverent, HERSOID confronts everything from the climate crisis to neoliberal mythology, from media manipulation to the commodification of dissent. His art doesn’t preach—it shrugs, scoffs, and occasionally cackles. It invites the viewer to laugh, wince, and think—often all at once.

Part visual diary, part social exorcism, HERSOID is a vivid portrait of an artist using humour and horror as tools of cultural archaeology, peeling back the gloss of contemporary life to reveal the quietly screaming machinery beneath. This is art for the age of exhausted irony—and Hersey is its master of ceremonies.”

Hersoid is once again flipping the switch and desperately trying to stay relevant. This time revisiting the logo from last year that was heavily influenced by and tied to the Shitface project.

The shitface inspired ‘Hersoid‘ was a capsule brand to tie in with the popular NFT project that launched two seasons in 2024.

The revised logo is a beefier handcrafted brand taking strong inspiration from the ‘Richard Clean’ and ‘Scripto’ fonts trawled from a free fonts website, that will themselves draw heavily on properly produced carefully crafted fonts by typography professionals. Everything is reduced to shit and costs nothing in the end…
The Hersoid 2025 brand looks like this:

Throughout the rebranding, the original Hersoid Roundel logo developed almost 20 years ago remains a mainstay of the hersoid brand:

New prints getting prepped for the print shop…
‘Baphomet’ series