In a symbolic sense, the mask in this body of work examines the shifting terrain of persona and identity, particularly the space between how we present ourselves to others and who we are when alone. Drawing from mythology and iconography, the work reflects on the many ways women have been portrayed in art, cinema, and literature.
Repressed fears and desires are frequently projected onto the female body, reinforcing narrow and binary narratives of what it means to be a woman. These projections suggest there is only one acceptable way—or its opposite—to embody femininity. This creates a paradox: being constantly seen as a body, while remaining unseen as a subject.
Joan Riviere’s seminal essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) suggests that femininity itself can function both as a symptom and a remedy for the anxiety women face when crossing boundaries between private and public spheres. For Riviere, the masquerade highlights the tension between social conformity and individual expression—a space where the woman can reclaim and liberate both her body and the privacy embedded in self-reflection.
In Tennessee Williams’s plays, the Southern belle—graceful, refined, and socially poised—emerges as a deeply lonely figure. Characters like Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield cling to idealized identities that no longer protect them, performing femininity as both armor and illusion. Beneath the elegance lies a quiet desperation: the fear of fading relevance, of being seen yet never truly known. This tension—between the poised surface and the ache beneath—resonates throughout the work, where the mask becomes a site of both beauty and exile.
Similarly, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described the persona as the face an individual presents to the world—a kind of mask designed to both shape external perception and conceal the true self.
This body of work consists of self-portraits in disguise, interwoven with images of women embodying various personas, identities, mythologies, and archetypes. These include Hollywood’s imagined ideals of feminine perfection, personified through figures like the bride, the mother, the maiden, the damsel in distress. The women in these images are not passive representations but active agents, reclaiming identity through the very roles designed to confine them. They reflect, resist, and reshape these projections, creating space for selfhood beyond the gaze.
