Self-portrait –

There is more to me than what you see

Keywords: Silence, fear, within-without,

vulnerability, resilience, honesty, infinity.

As I enrolled for Mustafa Sabbagh’s workshop, I knew that I would have to face some of my ghosts. The first of them being my uncanny distress in front of a camera: I guess that I “un”consciously took the decision to confront it by attending a photographers’ workshop dedicated to “Self-Portrait”!

Posing for a photograph in front of a camera is something close to torture for me. The shooting day proved me right: my mate-photographer had me into tears well before she even started looking at her camera lens. This cracked open a cave I would have to explore.

Why do I have such a fear? Do I fear seeing Me not being perfect? Not as perfect as I wish I were? Do I fear that some hidden facets of my personality I ignore will be revealed, or my most vulnerable inner Me become visible? I believe all those answers carry an element of truth.

Sitting with that, The GHOST made its way back to my memory: a recurring nightmare of my childhood.

“I am gifted a Mickey Mouse mask during a village kermess, I hesitantly put it on my face and there the nightmare starts as I feel that the mask gets glued on my face. I desperately try to take it off. I do so, but then another Mickey Mouse mask is underneath, and on, and on. I can’t get rid of the mask/s. My head shrinks. My all-Me shrinks. I disappear in the void of the Universe.”

I have been since then scared of masks.

Both fears relate to the persona, the visible and the invisible.

My main medium of artistic expression being ceramics, Mustafa asked me to deconstruct the idea of traditional ceramics and to document the process with photographs.

Making a mask as a self-portrait is the work I chose to make. Confronting my fears and showing what has to be shown, the seemingly invisible becomes visible.  

Creation process: Unveiling the mask/s

As a first step I decided to cast a plaster mold of my face.

Then a second one.

I then made a third mask by casting silicone over the second one. A flexible mask that I can deform, turn inside out.

I molded white clay into a fourth mask out of the silicone mask.

I twisted and partially turned inside out the silicone mask creating a fifth mask with very damp clay, casting a fifth mask.

I cast an integral plaster mold from the first mask. That is the sixth. From which I created a plaster cast, which is the seventh one, from which I can/could extract as many masks as I wished for.

All of them have been birthing, extracting themselves in a continuous movement of creation.

Documenting the process: I have been documenting the process with photographs. The masks are not perfect, not alike either. Still, they speak to me, reveal what is visible and what is not. The importance is in the process: seeing what does not want to be seen, showing what owes to be shown. This too becomes part of the artwork.

Installation artwork The Jeweled Net of Indra reflects the visible and the invisible, that you want or don’t want to be seen. “This is a universe in which each point is the center, and in which we find the whole universe within each point. When viewed this way, there is no longer the illusion of a separate self and we cease trying to escape” The Mirror of Yoga, Richard Freeman.

Installation artwork There is more to me than what you see is a reflection about the visible and the non-visible, fear of disappearing, fear of death, of the Void in the Universe. “Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces” Claude Cahun, photograph, 1930.

January 20-21, 2023

Focus_Artphilein Foundation

Lugano, Switzerland.