Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose.
It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.
Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
Chuck Palahniuk
As I worked in silence with shards and pieces of egg shell, gluing, painting and marking it occurred to me these were perfect self portraits – cracked open, glued together bits marked with illegible words and streaks, just like me.
Cracked. Glued back together, changed by experiences.
Marked by the interactions of life.
An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait,
not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not,
but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.
Jacques Derrida
More and more I can embrace that I am growing increasingly mature,
marked by life experience,
releasing attempts for perfection and becoming
more gloriously human than ever before.
Deep breath.
When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting
more and more, you must end up with an egg.
– Pablo Picasso
Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says.
What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget.
Everything is collage, even genetics.
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly.
We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.
Michael Ondaatje
bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees,
fears we have hidden in as if caves.
I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.
I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature,
not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings.
We are communal histories, communal books.
We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
Michael Ondaatje
