4. Losing Sense of Self

My work in Spring 2018 was focused on the incredibly personal and unsettling feeling of Losing Your Sense of Self. Through the medium of digital photomontage, I explored the emotions involved with this feeling. My final piece is a series of images that aim to illustrate the intense feeling of vulnerability and uncertainty that came with losing my sense of self, my sense of who I was.

To lose your sense of self is to feel as though you don’t know your place or what you should be doing and why should you even be doing things in the first place and what’s even the point of anything and how do you even vocalise these thoughts because they aren’t real thoughts, they are just a feeling. A feeling of unease and uncertainty and insecurity in who you are. It was a visceral sensation which completely knocked me off balance and left me feeling unstable and vulnerable. When my sense of self was disrupted during a period of depression brought on by the contraceptive pill, nothing felt safe or familiar. It left me feeling I was weak and feeble and silly. I felt like I should be able to justify why I felt this way and when I was unable to produce a reason for this unease, the feeling of inadequacy only greatened.

I wanted to investigate how I could confront this feeling of being at odds with myself and began by manipulating photos first through collage and, later, digitally through a photo editing app. My initial collages, inspired by Anna Bu Kliewer and Erin Case, removed faces from women in magazines, thus creating an image which is read very differently to the original. By removing these people’s faces, I remove their ‘identity’, thereby also removing others’ ability to read them as people. The sense of who/what these people are/may be becomes ambiguous and uncertain. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. The theory suggests there to be a certain point past which you aren’t quite sure if what you’re seeing is human or not, creating disconcerting and unnerving feelings.

I wanted to further play with the idea of the uncanny within the works that make up my final piece and to do so, I decided to digitally remove the aspects of a selection of old photographs that helped to situate the subject (myself) within a comprehensible reality, therefore destabilising the audience’s ability to understand the image or connect it with pre-established ideas of existing realities. The main way I aimed to put across the loss of my sense of self through my works was through further intervening with the subjects’ faces within the images via the dispersion tool. This has the effect of creating a certain ambiguity to the subjects while also illustrating the feeling of unease and uncertainty that comes with the disruption of your sense of self. Edward Honaker uses interventions like this within his photographs documenting his depression to allude to his feelings. I wanted to incorporate large, flat expanses of pastel within my photomontages as I feel it assuages the otherwise perturbed nature of the image and adds an element of reassuring gentleness and familiarity, a technique also used by two of my main influences; collage artist Adam Hale and photographer Ina Jang.

Your sense of self is a gut feeling; it is the level of emotional and mental comfort you feel within yourself and is the degree to which you are comfortable in your own skin. Your sense of self gives you the feeling of being ‘in your proper place’. My work explores the relationship I have had with my own sense of self and how its loss deeply affected the relationship I had with myself.