This work sits at the foundation of my ongoing fascination with skulls, asking a simple question: what remains when everything else is stripped away?
A skull is the great equaliser. Beneath wealth, class, gender, beauty, achievement, belief and identity lies the same underlying structure. It is the architecture common to us all, surviving long after the stories we construct about ourselves have faded.
The image is a self-portrait, though not in the conventional sense. Rather than depicting appearance, it imagines the artist reduced to the barest possible form: a cranium emerging from darkness. It is a portrait of the self beneath the surface.
Ghostly figures drift through layers of spray paint surrounding the skull. These forms suggest memories, influences, inherited voices and fragments of experience the people and events that shape identity over time. Torn scraps of paper cling to the surface like remnants of stories and creative acts, hinting at the narratives from which the self is constructed.
Part memento mori and part self-examination, the work asks how much of who we are is innate and how much is imposed. Beneath the layers of identity, it searches for the essential structure that connects us all.