Songs of Innocence and Experience

This self-portrait collage project is a reflection on post-modern love and it’s about the clash of expectations and reality and the clash of idealized unearthly love par excellence and pure reality. I’ve always been obsessed with stories and paintings of unfulfilled love stories and I often positioned myself into the same role in my own personal life being drawn to relationships that were not destined to last. I also began to romanticize the heartaches throughout the years which resulted in a pattern. I created self-portraits referencing iconic paintings and heroines from the history of art and literature and started creating collages using these images and fragments of texts. I was using scanned details from my favourite books and poems, the descriptions of longing and love, such as Wuthering Heights, Onegin, Red and Black, Sorrows of Young Werther and I simultaneously included handwritten fragments of texts I got throughout the years from lovers, Tinder dates or ex-boyfriends, sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful or sometimes even vulgar messages. This combination I felt was a strong reflection and a constant contemplation on Love.