Self-Harm Portrait, 2020
Acrylic on defaced canvas
30 x 30 cm
In art related news you can come across stories such as “Man punches hole through $15 million Monet painting”, “Man defaces multi-million dollar Rothko Painting”, etc. For this project I wanted to make something that connects the subject of self-harm with the thought of defacing art.
Self-harm affects people who might think or feel poorly of themselves. And sometimes I can really hate myself. And so I came up with this idea of defacing my own portrait by punching a hole through it and then ripping off the parts that made up the face. The idea being to demonstrate the gravity of self-harm but in an art context as a sort of cautionary tale. In other words, if this is what destroying a portrait painting looks like, then maybe don’t do it to yourself.