Grace Florence
 Perceptions of Self


Morality, Mortality, and The Human Condition
Fall 2024




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This week I examined the idea of self perception and how we process the concept of only having one body, and one perspective. There is a sense of all consuming panic I feel whenever I remember that I will live my whole life in this body, with this mind, seeing with these eyes, and smelling with this nose. It’s a feeling of being trapped within the skin your constrained to. Beyond that whenever visualizing myself or trying to figure out which features of mine are most prominent from an outside perspective, I struggle to decide on what I truly look like. I will never be able to see myself through the eyes of another person and I find that haunting. I wanted to use a distortion technique to help visually convey the emotions I feel when percieving myself.
The idea of only ever seeing ourselves in reflections or photos leads to a mental distortions of our physical appearance. Recalling memories, conversations, or experiences can also lead to distorted results because we will only ever see things through our own perspective. Due to the nature of self perception being through a distorted lens, it only makes sense to use a distortion technique in the process.









































Using the found imagery found on the right, I sliced the headshots and wove them together. each outcome is a result of combining two sperate images, cutting one vertically, and the other horizontally.

































After making this first one, I was curious about how the distortion would change cutting the strips in different sides or from different angles. I decided to make 3 more, one with smaller strips, one with larger strips, and one with 
diagonal strips. 



























The diagonal result ended up being my favorite because it looked less aparently woven and more blended and ehtereal. 








































































I then thought about how I would want to use these images in the context of a book. I pulled lyrics a song that I associate with ideas surrounding self perception, and combined that with my favorite image I made.

In the back of an interview magazine I had laying around, there was a page of several headshots of Paul Morrissey. These photos were all the same size and shot in the same style. The only difference between the photos came from the positioning of his head. I thought this was great source material for a woven piece. It would be good for visualizing the dissonacnce between our view and reality in a way that disorients the viewer.