Words: Isabella Wordsworth
Images: Isabella Wordsworth

Image caption:  Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013, Isabella Wordsworth

1 July 2026

“Perhaps it is easier to empathise only when the other can speak back. When they can do the emotional labour. When they can educate you themselves.”


Isabella Wordsworth

01.

As I wait in line to enter Ron Mueck's latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Australia, I am aimlessly scrolling my phone. I pass the news that yet another Minnesotan has been senselessly murdered in the protests against the ICE raids unfolding in America. As the 4K video plays, I find myself at the front of the line. I scan my ticket and stumble in.

I grew up in Minnesota, a place that feels impossibly far away now, both in time and distance. Yet moments like this pull me roughly back. I see my classmates marching in the streets, my teachers fiercely protecting their students. I hear sirens in the background while on the phone with my father. The distance collapses.

Standing before Ron Mueck's hyper-realistic sculptures, I find myself asking: what does it take to force empathy?

Crisis as a First Language

In this exhibition, as you stand amongst giants, you wait as if trying to catch them in the moment they gasp for breath. You are suspended in space and time, watching for the façade to crumble, watching for proof that these figures are alive. This suspense feels deeply familiar. It is no longer abnormal but a constant companion for anyone who has called America home in the last decade. That feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop but dreading the moment it does.

My high school years were tainted by the height of the school shooting crisis from 2016 to 2020. What is meant to be some of the last carefree moments of adolescence became the birth of a generation marred by real-world threats imposing on our vision of the future. We marched then too. I remember making signs and walking out of class, feeling righteous in our freedom, our voices so young and carrying so far. In our shouts we could not yet hear the adults in charge still arguing about whether the problem was real. We didn't yet understand that this crisis wasn't new; it had been simmering for years, and years later it is still bubbling over. Even now, Everytown for Gun Safety, an American non-profit organisation which advocates for gun control and against gun violence, tracked 159 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025, resulting in 53 deaths and 148 injuries. But to me, a defiant seventeen-year-old, it arrived fully formed, the way all crises arrive to those encountering them for the first time.

My father is a humanitarian. The shape of his work has meant I have spent my whole life inside the seam between safety and its absence, growing up across India, China, Thailand, then the American Midwest, with migration and displacement as the furniture of our lives. He taught me that proximity to suffering is not optional. That you can be raised adjacent to crisis so consistently that the line between your life and disrupture begins to blur. I followed him into that work. I still do it now, in London, working with migrant populations encountering crises that journalists don't find compelling enough to grace the front pages.

02.


Ron Mueck chicken/man, 2019
Isabella Wordsworth

From the Streets to the Feed

Watching these sculptures frozen in time, faces never twitching, you are left to wonder: what thought is trapped inside them?Each wrinkle, each mole crafted with meticulous intention. Their eyes never quite meeting your stare. What do they replay endlessly, over and over in their minds, for eternity?

The summer George Floyd was murdered, I was in Minneapolis. I was there when the city burned and when the city held vigil and when the city tried, publicly, to reckon with itself. I marched in the streets with people I had gone to school with, through neighbourhoods I knew. The peculiar grief of watching people you love be forced to finally see themselves and their home clearly is difficult to describe. You want the reckoning to come. You dread what it costs.

At first, that summer was treated as a marker for change. "The power of social media". In the UK I could very clearly see the "colonisers guilt" playing on my peers and tutors faces. There was an irony in their swift condemnation of racism in the US whilst the minorities in the UK find their voices going hoarse, begging people to hear them.

Personally, that summer marked a turning point: a fearful apathy towards our screens. Each day our phones lit up with what had once felt like a uniting force, had become a dreaded death counter. And as the news started dripping away from our feeds, we noticed it wasn't just our feeds that it was disappearing from. We were watching something that had felt like a turning point slowly stop feeling that way. The news cycle moved on. The structural conditions remained. And those of us who had been in the streets found ourselves back at our phones, scrolling through grief that had been compressed into content, our own urgency now indistinguishable from noise.

Each monumental human rights violation arrives like an echo. We ask ourselves: is this the moment we have been bracing for? A reckoning? A turning point?

This, too, is familiar. History repeating itself. My voice grows hoarse, yet it feels as though my words mean nothing. Why must I beg you to listen?

Empathy on Demand

I peer out of the corner of my eye at the sculpture of an adolescent girl. Her posture is tense, arms drawn slightly inward, shoulders raised in the particular geometry of someone trying to take up less space. It is so effective that I find myself averting my gaze, as though my looking might make her more uncomfortable. The instinct is involuntary, and I notice it with some surprise, that I am modifying my behaviour in response to the discomfort of a figure who cannot feel me watching.

Others are not doing this. Others stare openly.

I find myself watching the viewers instead, the ones who stand close, phones raised, heads tilted with the relaxed entitlement of those who have decided that scrutiny is simply what art is for. It feels repugnant in a way I struggle to name precisely. Her eyes remain lowered beneath their gaze. And I wonder: how, in a gallery explicitly designed to incite empathy, can someone look so devoid of shame? 

Perhaps it is easier to empathise only when the other can speak back. When they can do the emotional labour. When they can educate you themselves. What has driven us to become so apathetic that the other must first prove they deserve empathy? Only then does their humanity demand recognition. Byung-Chul Han has written of our present condition as a transparency society, a world in which everything is made visible, and yet nothing is truly seen. Visibility, he argues, is not the same as perception; exposure is not understanding. The viewers with their phones raised are not witnessing the girl. They are documenting their own presence in front of her. Han's transparency is exactly this: the compulsive need to bear witness, without the time or space to understand the weight of the gaze (Han, 2015).

Susan Sontag, writing on the photography of atrocity, observed that images of suffering may do less to generate solidarity than to foster a sense of distance, that to look at suffering from safety, mediated and framed, is already to be partially absolved of the obligation to feel it (Sontag, 2003). Mueck removes the frame. There is no caption and there is no scrolling away. There is only the room, the figure, and the choice to stay or leave.

I have watched this demand for legibility in my humanitarian work. I have watched people require migrants to justify their displacement. I have watched audiences require grief to be photogenic before they will attend to it.

Journalist Gina Fairley writes of Mueck's exhibition: "This is not about us. It is about them. And through them, we find ourselves." In their stillness, these figures hold a space where empathy is no longer immediate or automatic, but something that might return if we stay long enough to feel (Fairley, 2025).

Distance as Illusion

One of the final sculptures emerges as you round the corner: Couple Under an Umbrella. The light pours through the umbrella, painting the floor with colour so vivid one could think it is staining the ground. The man grips her arm, the wedding band imprinted on his finger the way his arm rests on hers. They are casually sprawled across each other, a gesture of familiarity, each place they make contact perfectly fitting the other's form. This is but a moment captured in a life long lived, but in that glimpse you see a permanence etched into their skin, making marks that time will not soon forget.

I left Minnesota for London and found that leaving did not reduce the stakes, it raised them. The fear I had lived under in America, that ambient dread of violence without warning, had not stayed behind. I arrived abroad and found it already there, differently dressed. Gaza. Ukraine. And now Iran. The ongoing crisis of people fleeing countries that the news treats as distant problems until they are not. Living and working with people crossing borders, I have come to understand that the collapse of distance I felt in that gallery queue is not metaphorical. It is the actual condition of the world. The crises are not separate events in separate places. They are one long emergency, with different names.

Leaving the States only gave me a clearer view of the shadow it casts, and the complicity other world powers carry within it. In daily life, it is difficult not to feel implicated in the actions of the country that shaped you. People land questioning gazes with every move America makes against their security, fearing the day its shadow reaches them too.

And in the middle of all of it, the scroll, the algorithm, the compressed grief, the footage that autoplays before you have decided whether you want to see it, so in this world where grief is a commodity, what can art still do?

Does it have a role in forcing empathy? Or, in a world of constant media and endless information, is art's role instead to slow people down long enough to feel anything at all?

Stillness as Resistance

As I emerge from the gallery into the shocking sunlight of mid-summer Australia, I instinctively reach for my phone again. Moving from a space where strangers shared moments of reflection and quiet admiration, I am suddenly returned to isolation. I stand among a crowd yet feel lost in another part of the world, watching protests met with brutality, communities grieving, while around me life continues uninterrupted. The screen delivers violence readily. It never delivers the time to truly process it.

Standing among Mueck's monumental bodies, frozen in suspended breath, I was finally forced to pause, not only to look at what was in front of me, but to confront the emotions roiling inside my own mind. The gallery had done something the feed cannot: it made leaving the only way to stop witnessing. It removed the option to scroll past.

Perhaps this is precisely what art can offer now: not as a spectacle that shocks us into morality, but as one of the last remaining places where time is made to slow. Jonathan Crary, writing on capitalism's progressive colonisation of attention, argues that the contemporary world has steadily eroded every space of non-productivity, rest, pause, the unmonitored hour, and that this erosion is inseparable from our diminishing capacity for sustained feeling (Crary, 2013). The gallery resists that logic. It manufactures stillness: moments where the viewer can no longer consume grief in transit, where attention cannot be redirected by an algorithm. Instead, the act of witnessing becomes something real again. Not just reflexes or reactions, but a choice, held open long enough to become a feeling.

I do not think art can fix what is broken. I am not sure anything can, not quickly, not cleanly. But I think there is something worth preserving in the insistence that stillness itself is a form of resistance. That staying in the room, with the discomfort, with the figures who will not meet your eyes, with the emotions you arrived carrying and didn't expect to find named, is not passive. It is among the most demanding things we can do.

My phone lights up in my hand. I look at it, then look away.

07.

Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013, Isabella Wordsworth

References

Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso.

Everytown for Gun Safety. (2025). Gunfire on school grounds in the United States. Everytown for Gun Safety.

Fairley, G. (2025). Ron Mueck: Encounter. ArtsHub.

Han, B. C. (2015). The transparency society. Stanford University Press.

Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Writer Bio

Isabella Wordsworth is a London-based Human Centered Designer and writer interested in empathy as a design problem, how spaces, images, and quiet rituals shape the ways we gather, witness, and remain with one another. Her work is rooted in designing with communities rather than for them. Moving between design and essay, she traces how culture is built collectively, layer by layer.

@isabella.wordsworth