The male gaze, sexualized and objectifying, was the dominant lens through which I viewed myself my entire life. Being privileged enough to meet the cultural standards of how a woman should be, I held onto this gaze in total blindness until the moment I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In a swift and brutal multi-stage process, most of what defined me as a woman, was severed and shed from me one by one.

The anticipated and then actual loss of my breasts shifted me from the theoretical realms of fantasy and anxiety, toward a literal castration of the "feminine phallus," the organ through which women are inscribed into the social, cultural, and sexual sphere. I moved between doctors who offered to make me the breasts I had always dreamed of: to reconstruct the amputated, sensual, and sensitive organ, and create a senseless monument that would mend the symbolic fabric and leave my body culturally legible and intact.

Two days before I was forced to part from my breasts forever, I pointed the camera at them to immortalize that which, a moment after being captured, would cease to be and remain only a representation of what once existed. Ça a été. The loss of the Master Signifier, whose presence granted unconscious validity to my identity and around which my deepest self-perception as a woman was constructed, shattered my being in ways I could not deconstruct or conceptualize in real-time. As a writer, I was left speechless.

The deconstruction of the woman I had been forced me to search for markers that would allow me to unify a persona with identity and presence. The only way I could act was to document the ongoing dismantling and reassembly as reflected in the mirror of my bedroom, which was the most significant domain of my life at that time as a person, a woman, and an artist.

And so, wounded, pained, and scarred, I surrendered completely to my role as Object, placing full trust in myself as the photographing Subject. I allowed me to dress, undress, and apply makeup to myself; to objectify, position, and examine me through every gaze etched into our collective unconscious as an expression of femininity. In return, the Subject, my photographing self, devoted herself to her anthropological role, aiming the camera as an objective eye and capturing the helpless object again and again. Examining the object as a fair and merciless judge, as a compulsive chronicler, looking her in the eye and leaving breadcrumbs to be found when I can attempt to reassemble the subject that will be embodied to me. 

Over these years, I became a woman who specializes in the loss of breasts. My professional and career were centered on the care and concern for the general loss of breasts in general women. I mastered care and empathy as tools that allowed a distance between me and the breast as an intimate organ. 

Yet, parallel to this professional detachment, within my studio, I performed Sisyphean reconstruction works of my severed intimacy, maintaining an ongoing intimate dialogue with the memory of my own beloved breasts and creating artifacts of their sensory dimension. 

Media: Self-portrait photography, makeup pigments on cowhide, multi-technique printmaking, and collage.