Self-Portraits in Clay, 2025

Self-Portraits in Clay is a series of eighteen works in which I explore self-portraiture not as an image but as a trace. In this project, I follow a gradual shift from incision to an almost immaterial surface, from representation to the pure imprint of gesture. Clay becomes a kind of flesh: it absorbs tension, holds emotional weight, and records what resists language.

The early pieces carry incised marks — a direct, almost primal form of writing on the material. As the series progresses, the incisions recede and give way to painterly surfaces shaped through different colors of clay. In the final works, I relinquish representation altogether, creating “impressions” of inner movement, fragments of a body leaving its presence without depicting its face.

Cracks, breaks, and imperfections remain untouched. They reveal vulnerability, pressure, and the emotional strain embedded in the process.

This project marks a profound inward turn in my practice. It forms the second half of an informal diptych with my earlier exhibition The Deer from the Sewer, shifting from the collective to the intimate, from narrative to introspection. In this series, the self-portrait dissolves into gesture, materiality, and silence, leaving only the imprint of my existence pressed into clay.