Silence as a learned reflex.

This series is a personal exploration of silence as something I have learned to carry in my body. I am the subject in these photographs, but I deliberately remove the face and fragment the body, turning myself into something less recognizable and more abstract. What remains are gestures, tension, skin, arms, neck and chest: a body that speaks without producing a voice.

The photographs are concerned with the body as both a physical and psychological space. I use repetition, embracing, covering and squeezing to suggest the ways in which I have learned to contain myself. The body becomes a site of discipline, where silence is not only an absence of speech, but also a physical reflex shaped by expectations of how one is supposed to exist, behave and present themself. There is also a queer quality to this abstraction; by removing the face and disrupting the conventional portrait, I distance the image from a fixed identity and instead focus on the body as something unstable, intimate and continuously negotiated.

The series is therefore both self-portraiture and body abstraction. I use my own body as material, but I obscure it enough for it to become something beyond a straightforward representation of myself. The black and white photographs further strip away contextual information, leaving only touch, form, tension and closeness.