Becoming Unmade
MA Project 2021-2022
This project traces the struggle of coming to a true self‑knowledge and identity, without mask or pretense. Visualizing metaphorical themes inspired by the book Till We Have Faces, it focuses on the subconscious veiling of the self as an act of self-protection. Despite attempts to hide beneath the constructed identity of the veil, buried remnants of the self reemerge as a looming, intrusive presence, creating a sense of internal disjunction and duality. Efforts to further strengthen the persona lead to increased self-deception and the progressive erosion of personhood. Recognizing and confronting what lies deep at the center of one’s soul requires a stripping back of illusions, a descent into one’s shadows, an act of unearthing. It is only in losing oneself and being unmade that a true identity can begin to form.
All text excerpts below reproduced with permission from Till We Have Faces © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1956, for 2022 MA graduation show, University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Berlin.
As well as I could, I locked a door in my mind.
I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together. […]
This was only the first stroke, a light one; the first snowflake of the winter I was entering, regarded only because it tells us what’s to come.
My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless.
Nearly all that I called myself went with it. It was as if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap.
Installation View, UE Berlin graduation show 2022, layered photographic prints with intervention, 24 x 36 cm
Installation View, UE Berlin graduation show 2022
Installation View, UE Berlin graduation show 2022, photographic print, 24 x 36 cm, cloth veil and wood
All day, and often all night too, I was…dragging up terrors, humiliations, struggles, and anguish that I had not thought of for years, letting Orual wake and speak, digging her almost out of a grave, out of the walled well.
Everything has to be begun over again.
“Die before you die. There is no chance after.”
The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire… I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.