'Selfie'

I was thinking about the idea of the selfie and its cultural position and I thought about how much I love seeing other people's self-portraits, which immediately made me want to take some photos of myself too. In the yellow glow-light of the evening. In my pyjamas. My most accurate state, really. Blessed be thy camera.

I do find this kind of self documentation really interesting and I love those little personal snippets of people's lives to be found online (after all, that's what many of us are doing here with our hideously self-indulgent blogs *audible wink*) and I love to capture and explore myself and my existence and my surroundings through considering myself and all aspects of ME. I remember art tutors telling me that my work was too insular or personal or whatever and I thought: "But............ my things................ that I make..... are about................... me? That's......................... completely understandable and fine? What's wrong with self-focus in my own life which fundamentally centres around me?" To me that insularity was paramount. That was my central thing. The core of everything.

I feel like the more I happily explore and celebrate my own existence and being and person, the more I also do the same thing with other people, and the better a person I become! Knowing and enjoying myself only strengthens my ability to know and love other people, I think. Me directing myself into my creative process and thought which may seem 'insular' has really only served to open me up and allow me to build upon myself again and again and again through a process of observation and celebration and creation which, for me, rests on images that contain myself either indirectly through text and ideas and my own voice, or directly by representations of myself like drawings or, yes, selfies. Or self-portraits, if you want to use a less loaded term.