Self-Residency Project
This self-portrait series was made over the course of 2025 to better understand myself through spontaneous image-making rather than explanations and biography. Using photographs of a younger version of myself, taken when I was nineteen (and one childhood image), the collaged images become portals to internal states that were forged alongside the shaping of my outer persona. Think of them as internal snapshots as counterpoints to the exterior, performative images.
These works explore early trauma, dissociation, and the largely unconscious adaptive strategies I developed as a sensitive person navigating an unsafe emotional landscape. The series traces a psychological arc from early wounding and disembodiment through performance, splitting, erotic power, and finally, conscious reflection.
Rather than pathologizing survival, these images explore how identity forms under pressure and the intelligence of adaptation—how withdrawing, masking, and self-presentation became ways of negotiating safety, agency, and belonging. This work is not an indictment of my past self, but an integration of her. By witnessing who I needed to become to survive, I make space for a future no longer governed by shame, guilt, or denial.
Self-Portrait I: Wounded Self, 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood panel, 15” x 23 1/2”
Self-Portrait I: Wounded Self hints at a hidden and guarded self. The wound is not visible, but what grew around it is: vigilance, protection, beauty, and silence.
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
Self-Portrait II: The Magician’s Trick , 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood panel, 25” x 25”
Self-Portrait II: The Magician’s Trick introduces the themes of illusion and control. Here, the self appears as subject while the magician, coming out of her head, teaches her to use imagination, performance, erotic power, and distraction to manage a world that couldn’t be faced directly.
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
Self-Portrait III: Disembodied, 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood box panel, 20” x 20”
In Self-Portrait II: Disembodied, the head inflates while the body recedes. The figure floats, ungrounded, surrounded by symbols and gestures that suggest flight and escape, while the shadow self gazes from a dark corner. This work reflects dissociation not as failure, but as a strategy—a way the self learned to keep going by stepping outside itself.
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
Self-Portrait IV: The Two of Me, 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood box panel, 19” x 19”
With Self-Portrait IV: The Two of Me, through navigating multiple relational and sexual traumas, the self splits. Two versions of the self are entwined, neither dominant, neither erased. This piece is about internal dialogue—the moment when fragmentation turns into relationship, and self-recognition becomes possible.
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
Self-Portrait V: Femme Fatale Rising, 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood box panel, 19” x 19”
Self-Portrait V: Femme Fatale Rising This self-portrait reflects a survival strategy I didn’t fully understand until much later: learning to become sexually desirable, paradoxically, as a way of staying safe. The yellows and oranges evoke both fire and heat: warmth and danger, attraction and threat. Sexuality here is not presented as performance or empowerment, but as adaptation—a nod to both its allure and potential peril; its power and its cost.
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
Self-Portrait VI: Self-Reflection, 2025
Mixed-media collage with encaustic wax finish on wood box panel, 19” x 19”
Original: Not For Sale (Project available for exhibition.)
My Animal Nature, 2023
Mixed-media collage on wood box panel, 11” x 14”
Original: SOLD