I use still images, haptic visuality, and mixed media to explore the fragmentation of traumatic memory. The film studies how a body is perceived in public and private spaces—through sexual and non-sexual gazes—and how these external lenses shape self-image, intimacy, and sexuality. The film prioritizes materiality and sensory experience over traditional narrative, inviting an embodied spectatorship in which the "screen" operates as a kind of skin that is textural, porous, and vulnerable.

I created a collage installation as a mini “theater” for the viewer. The gaze of the masks on the wall at eye level parallel the film’s exploration of different modes of perception, both consensual and not consensual.

In the film, these paintings serve to connect the physical media of the masks with digital footage into a cohesive visual language while implicating concepts of sexuality as described above. I use a consistent color palette rooted in pink and other tones coded as feminine. These influences contribute to an aesthetic that is hyper-feminine, hyper-sexual, and intentionally kitschy. The work represents a “vomit” of sexuality—a dirty, excessive aspect of sexuality that is being expelled and dumped out. 

These paintings draw on references from London graffiti and street art. 

The masks represent an inner demon or a haunting memory. When worn it covers the face, further sexualizing the body. I reference Gauri Gill and her use of masking to transform a figure in ordinary public spaces, questioning how an unmoving object like the mask relates to a living body when worn.

In the film, the masked figure shows up in the domestic space, interrupting the everyday. With the mask covering the face, the viewer is left only with the body, which raises questions about perception and agency: does the subject want to be seen, and where does the viewer’s gaze go—to the face that is absent, or to the body that remains?

Within the film, the prints operate as a method of vertical filmmaking and haptic cinema, blurring memory in an uneven, unstable way. Their roughness and materiality break the cleanliness of a digitized visual world characterized by pixels and san serif fonts. These images shift the tone from initial comedy and absurdity into darkness, symbolizing the underlying trauma that exists beneath a façade of pink, hyper-sexualized femininity.

I incorporate lace to engage with a “dark femininity,” using material delicacy to complicate softness with opacity and weight. 

I confront the Chinese superstition surrounding the number “4,” which is phonetically linked to the word for “death.” It considers sleep as a form of temporary death, questioning what sleep represents and how consciousness dissolves. 

In the film, the image manifests as an alert, anxious face surfacing through dreams, sleep, and the subconscious. Physical layering of polyfilm, and digital layering through various opacities and screen blending modes reflect surfaces of consciousness and how the mind and body can bury traumatic memory.