Masking is a series of collages exploring the psychological concept of masking—the performance of socially acceptable identities and the tension of inhabiting selves constructed for survival or belonging. The mask becomes both protective and restrictive: a means of navigating social structures and systems of power while exposing the violence embedded within them.

The works draw from a deliberately unstable visual archive that includes military camouflage, office furniture, medical and scientific imagery, theatre and European carnival traditions, animals, architecture, technology, modernist sculpture, art history, ethnographic museum collections, and everyday objects. I am particularly interested in visual systems used to classify, measure, and define normality and difference. Medical taxonomies, scientific diagrams, measurement devices, and institutional forms of display present themselves as objective ways of organizing knowledge, while remaining historically entangled with structures of authority.

My methodology draws on histories of political collage and Surrealist montage, using fragmentation and the surreal as forms of feminist intervention. Through cutting, juxtaposition, erasure, distortion, and recontextualization, images designed to identify, categorize, discipline, or control are made to behave differently. Furniture becomes a mouth; camouflage becomes skin; an instrument of measurement becomes an eye. Boundaries between human and object, organic and mechanical, functional and absurd begin to collapse.

The resulting figures resemble portraits but resist coherent identity, hovering between visibility and concealment, human and object, organic and mechanical.

By dismantling visual languages of classification, Masking creates figures that refuse stable categories. Rather than revealing an authentic self beneath the mask, the collages propose identity as continuously assembled—fragmentary, adaptive, and shaped by the systems through which we see ourselves and one another.