“Revised Edition” BY Jessica Wiercx

Instructions:

You are made up of a vast combination of features and characteristics, borrowed and learned from a library of your ancestors and the people you love. This prompt, “Revised Edition”, is intended to spark an investigation into the many possible variations of you.

Option 1

1. Collect images of your family members, as far and near in ancestry as possible.

2. Identify the physical features you resemble or share most closely with each of them. Compile a catalogue of those features.

3. Use your catalogue of features as a reference to create one or a series of ‘collage’ self-portraits. The portrait can be a photo collage using your collected images, a drawing, or any other visual process you’d like to explore. The end portrait doesn’t have to look exactly like you! The goal is to create one or a series of many possible variations of you.

Option 2

1. Collect memories: what features and characteristics stand out to you about the people you love? The people we love become a part of ourselves – they mould and shape our own identity. Create a portrait which represents the people you love as a single entity or as an aspect of yourself.

A Quick Bio = An enthusiast of finding portraits in accidental places and by unexpected means.

I spent the summer of 2020 slowly digesting a book about Sappho, an enigmatic ancient Greek poet who is known to be one of the first documented female authors. I developed a desire to know the face of the woman behind her inspiring yet painfully mysterious and fragmented poetry, but I had a challenge: how would I paint her portrait without knowing what she looked like? I concluded that the best way to create a theoretical portrait of Sappho would be to research the bone structure and facial features which are native to her geographical population. Sappho would have been one of many other possible genetic outcomes – a complex amalgamation of her ancestors and their features. This led me to wonder about myself: what if I had become the product of an entirely different genetic formula? How many theoretical versions of me are there and what do I look like?

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