Appearances

February 2024 - present

Appearances is an ongoing photo-diary that explores the aestheticization and commodification of identity, and the relationship between being and perception within a culture steeped in self-surveillance and spectacle. As poet and theologian John O’Donohue remarks, there is an “evacuation of interiority going on in our times”—a shift amplified by the digital age, where matters of identity are mediated by images and encoded within online frameworks of power.

Within this cultural landscape, selfhood is governed by forms of simulation: shaped through processes of embodiment, projection, and the performance of visual and social codes. Grounded in automatism, my practice follows subconscious impulses to examine how identity is an act of consumption, construction, and projection. Drawing from childhood memories of playing with paper dolls, I use assemblage techniques to deconstruct and reconfigure my likeness, evoking the hybridity, artifice, and fluidity of contemporary self-representation.

Fragmentation becomes a tool for revealing identity as mutable and dialogical—negotiated between self and society, interiority and exteriority, individualism and conformity. Influenced by thinkers like Flusser, McLuhan, Debord, Baudrillard, and Byung-Chul Han, the work reflects on how simulation has eroded authenticity, turning the self into a perpetual project of reinvention.