Self Portrait
Self-Portrait is a multimedia series in which I continually work on a staged photograph of myself made in my father’s likeness. Each iteration begins from the same source yet arrives at a different end. Through this practice I investigate: How can the repeated interpretation of one image become a method for navigating a fragmented sense of self? What happens to "meaning" when the same source is transformed across techniques and material, and how do these shifts reveal memory’s instability?
2015-2024
Image, Video, 3D
"The only physical trace I own of my father is a single studio portrait. I initiated this project as a personal act of remembrance. Over time, I realised this process was also a way to investigate broader questions about how identity is constructed and absence is defined."
Selfportrait primarily finds its language from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (The Generation of Postmemory, 2012), where memories are inherited through images and gestures rather than direct experience.
In development of this work, I have created successive reworkings across media: digital retouching, textile embroidery, collage, 3D, AI, sculptural renderings, animation, printed textiles and type. Each iteration is produced as both experiment and response, creating a chain of translations instead of a definitive image.
By staging, inhabiting, and transforming the portrait, I have constructed new memory through practice. This iterative method functions as inquiry: each medium alters affect and meaning, making visible how images can inherit and propagate past memory. And how the notion of memory itself can be unstable and open to transformation.
The methodology is intentionally open-ended, sustaining an archive that fragments and reforms with each return.
