Selected Work / Unraveled Identities
Unraveled Identities
The self as borrowed material - a serene figure coming quietly undone.
Advertising campaign · 2025
Role
Creative Director & Artist
Scope
Painterly-surrealist portrait series & art direction
Outcome
Twelve plates, three painterly treatments, one migrating vermilion pulse
Challenge
Identity is the most painted subject there is, which makes it the hardest to say anything new about. Most surreal portraiture leans on shock - the uncanny for its own sake. I wanted a series about the self coming apart that stayed quiet, beautiful, and precise, where the strangeness carried meaning instead of just effect.
Opportunity
I had two starting images - a woman crowned by sea creatures, and a glass slipper holding a frog - that already shared a language: the human figure dissolving into something borrowed. That was the thesis waiting to be built out. The opportunity was to turn two one-off pieces into a system - one idea about identity, twelve times, each plate trading the self for a different non-human part.
Strategy
Let the two source paintings set the rules instead of flattening them into one look. They gave the series its axes: a pale grisaille figure against thick painted sky on one end, an airy mixed-media collage on warm cream on the other. Every plate lives somewhere on that line, and the constants are held elsewhere - a serene closed-eye calm, and exactly one warm vermilion accent per plate that migrates down the body across the series.
Process
I wrote the concept for each plate first - moth as spoken language, roots as lineage, coral as the lungs we build from countless small lives, thread and needle as the repair - then assigned each subject to one of three treatments drawn from the originals: grisaille bust on painted sky for the plates that live in the body, cream-paper collage with raw pencil passages for the plates that read as documents and objects, and a hybrid where the painted sky tears into the paper. Vertical format, muted values, one red note each.
Creative Direction
Held the constraint without holding the style. One warm accent, always; if a plate needed a second to work, the composition was not resolved yet. But sameness is not cohesion - the first pass rendered all ten plates in a single treatment and the series went flat. Re-anchoring on the two originals restored the range: the red thread and the closed eyes carry the unity, so the surfaces are free to vary. Titles do the last bit of thinking - Salt Mirror, Coral Lung, The Drowned Bloom.
Outcome
A twelve-plate series that opens with the two source paintings and unfolds across three registered treatments - exhibition-ready as a single row or a 3x4 grid, and legible as a designed body of work about the self as borrowed, provisional material.
Lessons learned
Restraint reads as intent. The calmer and more reduced each portrait got, the more unsettling it became - and the more it said.
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