Know My Name

Persona in Shadow is a series of nine Works and around six of them directly reference the work of a Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, who worked probably a hundred years ago now. And when I saw his work, even though I quite like his work, but there were aspects of his work that I felt a need to respond to because in some ways they are quite disturbing in their depiction of—almost this sort of psychology of a woman. And also, he used a lot of figures that were quite centralised, including a very famous one called Puberty. But in choosing those works and responding to them, I wanted to insert my own body into them. But I needed to do that not just as a reposing of the images, but to show my uncomfortability with some of what's depicted in those images.

And the way I achieved that was by basically making an outline from Munch's work like a sort of cartoon in a way, and gridding that up, and then photographing myself in each of those different squares, taking that pose. When I brought all those different photographs together, the kind of rule that applied to that was to keep the outline of the Munch image true to the original image. And that had the effect of fracturing my own body. And for me that symbolised my kind of response to those images and a way, I guess to express to an audience that uncomfortability.