Unravel
-ongoing-
An explorative on-going series of self-portraits exploring perception, female identity, invisibility and the societal masks we wear on varying platforms. The performative series questions what lies beneath the socially constructed bandages we wear and what happens when we dare to unravel them. How much are the social masks we wear masking our true selves and what does that true self look like? What are we not expressing out of fear of not fitting in to social and cultural norms and expectations? Are we able to see deeper than meets the eye?
By wrapping my head tightly in bandages I seek to remove that which is identifiable, the face, paying attention instead to pose and the sensations that arise as I unravel. Both the process and end result are most often unplanned and in the unravelling I experience a relief and freedom yet also an exposure and sudden vulnerability in revealing what lies beneath.
“The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’."
- Joyce Carol Oates
“We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.”
- Patrick Rothfuss
“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
- Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet
“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”
“The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’. “
- Joyce Carol Oates
“The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’."
- Joyce Carol Oates
“The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.”
- Agatha Christie