The Fragmentation of Identity
– Reconstructing the Familiar in Portrait

After exploring the abstraction of letters and their blurred familiarity, we ventured into a new realm: the human face. Initially working with stock images found online – disposable in their abundance and accessibility – we began dissecting portraits, breaking them down into key elements: eyes, noses, mouths, ears, and hair. We then reassembled these components in new ways, creating visually striking and often unsettling results.

This shift from numbers and letters to the human face brought new challenges. The familiar human face – instantly recognisable – became a canvas for experimentation. By crudely applying new features to each portrait, we altered the images in a way that evokes a deep sense of displacement. The results feel familiar, but something is unmistakably and deliberately off. There’s a crudeness to the work, an intentional rawness that strikes a chord, much like the feeling you get when your brain struggles to make sense of something – it pulls your attention into focus but cannot fully resolve the image. It echoes the unsettling effect of AI-generated images or the trends in beauty editing apps that widen eyes, smooth skin, and change body contours to create a new avatar of the original model. What, then, is real in our digital lives?

This work can be seen as a reflection of our current culture, where appearances are constantly manipulated and edited, either through cosmetic surgery or digital filters and lenses on social media. Unlike the polished and perfected versions of ourselves we post online, the crude, disjointed nature of these images highlights the unnaturalness of these alterations. It’s a commentary on how we curate ourselves for public consumption, often resulting in an uncanny, almost surreal version of reality.

The initial use of stock images added another layer to this exploration. There’s something oddly disposable about using portraits of strangers found online – people we don’t know, yet who become subjects of transformation and manipulation. Unlike the personal investment in creating our own self-portraits, the ease with which we can chop up and rearrange these anonymous faces mirrors the casual way we consume and alter images of both ourselves and others in the digital age.

Through this project, we invite viewers to reflect on how we see and present ourselves in a world where identities can be manipulated at the click of a button. By fragmenting and reconstructing these familiar yet unfamiliar faces, we highlight the delicate balance between recognition and distortion, forcing us to question what is real, what is altered, and how these changes shape the way we perceive both ourselves and others