Selfhood.
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
Augustine of Hippo/Bernard of Clairvaux.
Selfhood is a meditation on presence, identity, and the uneasy boundary between what belongs to the body and what is cast off.
Rather than relying on likeness or surface, the project turns to what is usually discarded.
Detached hair occupies a liminal space: intimately mine yet strangely other. This tension aligns with Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection, where the expelled body unsettles the very idea of self.
The jar preserves this discomfort, holding what would normally be erased.
Antonin Artaud’s critique of representation also resonates here. Instead of mediating the body through symbolic codes, Selfhood confronts material presence directly.
The portrait is not an image of the body but a trace of its ongoing transformation, an encounter with what lingers after the body has moved on.
