kouroi

Started during the last year of my 20s, ‘kouroi’ looks at my evolving relationship with my youth. Boyhood is portrayed through the models' bodies, movements and expressions in an act of collaborative representation and appropriative self-projection.

Started during the last year of my 20s, ‘kouroi’ explores my evolving relationship with the idea of youth.

Reflecting on the idea of boyhood at a stage where I cannot claim the word for myself anymore, I wondered how that manifests in these young men’s bodies, in their movements, attitudes and expressions. How does it exist around their identities and characterises them? When is boyhood shed in order to make a man?

I have looked for evidence in what is left of their age in mine and in what they possess that I have let go of by now. I have sough an answer in the subtraction of mine and theirs identities.

These portraits are a collaborative effort to present the models’ selves sincerely in the context of youth-hood, often resulting in deep, if fleeting, connections between the sitter and myself.

The graphic interventions on prints, represent an appropriative act of projection that follows that of collaboration. They visualise the reality of portrait-making as a means of self-representation, manifesting the heavy hand of the observer and author in their production.