Narrations – portraits, 120x120cm, carved woodblock and wood impression on Wenzhou paper, 2024

Narrations – portraits is a series of three large-scale woodprints, 120×120 cm, made in 2023 and 2024, that explore representations of subjectivity in firebugs. Pictures are on the right and the page above.
A typical way of honoring and acknowledging a beings singular presence is through portraiture. By choosing this visual strategy, the aim is to represent firebugs as subjects with personhood and not as mere biological specimens.
The work is inspired by Estelle Zhong Mengual‘s analysis of Frederic Edwin Church‘s painting Au coeur des Andes (1852), where she points out that the artist „fait ce geste inoui de peindre les vegetaux comme des visages.“ (Zhong Mengual 2021: 51)
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