Description

Shadow (self-portrait)

In self-portraiture, the artist is both the author and the subject of their work. The capturing of a likeness in self-portraiture holds a very different significance to the conventional portrait. The appearance of our own selves is secondary – the image in the mirror is oftentimes a strange curiosity – as though we are somehow separate from not only our appearance but our actual bodies, to how we may be growing, ageing or changing shape.

The self-portrait points to this dislocation, this dysmorphic gap – where a likeness is not a means for knowing; rather it becomes a temporal stage for an invisible performance.

This image offers no confirming details of identity, time and place – an external reality has been suspended, disavowed. This erases the image as evidence and the subject as author, opening a liminal zone between the body and the mind that is momentary, a temporal presence. The uneven join between the body and consciousness is packed with the expansive ooze of the unconscious. A realm of shadows for performances in and above the Real.