A city of handmade plush citizens becomes the setting for ten scenes of guarded intimacy, private competence, emotional opacity, and indirect care. Drawn from my own experience of schizoid personality disorder, the collection interprets Harry Guntrip’s nine characteristics through ordinary urban life.
At the Edge of the Room is a series of ten hyperreal images set in an ordinary contemporary city inhabited entirely by handmade plush animals. Its residents commute, work late, attend weddings, share cinema seats, drink coffee, prepare each other’s clothes, and pose for photographs. Their bodies are visibly manufactured from worn fabric, exposed seams, soft stuffing, and small bead eyes. Within their world, these bodies are entirely ordinary.
The series emerges from the artist’s experience of living with schizoid personality disorder and draws on the nine characteristics identified by psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip: introversion, withdrawnness, narcissism, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalization, and regression.
These characteristics operate as overlapping coordinates throughout the collection. Introversion becomes a book opened inside a crowded café or a city rebuilt in miniature. Withdrawnness appears through carefully preserved intervals. Self-sufficiency emerges in an office that becomes easier to inhabit after everyone leaves. Loss of affect is complicated by practical gestures of care whose emotional meaning remains unspoken.
The plush bodies create a tension between tactile softness and emotional unreadability. They appear designed to be touched, yet their stitched expressions reveal almost nothing. Feeling must therefore be located in behaviour: a shirt ironed for an absent partner, a shared box of popcorn, a camera held in front of a group, or a useful task chosen during a party.
The collection offers one subjective visual language for schizoid experience. It considers the positions from which connection remains possible without complete exposure, and the private systems through which affection, autonomy, loneliness, and inner abundance can coexist.
Medium: AI-assisted digital image
Year: 2026
Digital edition: Unique NFT, 1/1
Physical claim: One signed and numbered archival pigment print, 40 × 50 cm, 1/1
Physical fulfilment: Produced and shipped by the artist following primary acquisition
Copyright: Copyright remains with the artist. Acquisition grants ownership of the NFT and corresponding physical print without transferring commercial reproduction rights.