I have a more fractured, layered, shifting, ambiguous idea of the self.

It’s a popularly held belief that in the middle of our selves, our deepest core-est identity is this sort of pearl, this this immutable centre of who we are as individuals. And I kind of feel now that that’s a false belief. We perform ourselves over time. This is the thinking is behind this self-portrait.

I’ve portrayed myself as a as a kind of walled city. And the wall I suppose in some ways represents my physical skin. But at the same time, it’s permeable. I absorb the influences and the ideas of the landscape I find myself in. And then they form me. I am as much my baggage as I am the person holding the baggage. Right on the sort of central piazza is the pearl. It’s not an illusion that we feel who we are, but I think if we peeled all the onion layers off our experience off we’d be left with an empty space.