Self-Portraiture

Mapping the Labyrinth

About ‘Mapping the Labyrinth’

The Minotaur is a creature born from a king’s hoarding greed and a mother’s cursed lust, used as a weapon to (quite literally) cow foreign powers.

But there is an ancient kylix drinking cup depicting the Minotaur as a baby, sitting on its mother’s lap as if about to suckle. The image cut me so deep: a small child who knows only hunger, later caged in a dark labyrinth by its own family as punishment for something as natural as a desire to be fed.

This led me to consider the ways we suffer for our ancestors’ mistakes and false beliefs, how inherited shame manifests in self-betrayal. This is both universal and personal: my struggle with disordered eating; the deep distrust of my own hunger; my abdominal scars from a teenage surgery for a digestive disorder I likely inherited; the learned self-denial of my basic needs in order to perform familial and cultural norms of “health” and “beauty.”

I hand-crafted both the mask and the labrys, a meditation on natural beauty turned self-destructive. It’s generally believed that the labrys was not a weapon, but instead a sacred tool of ancient Minoan goddesses. But the Minotaur in this series reluctantly turns that sacred tool on itself, resigned to the horror of mutilating its own body in order to navigate a way out of the dark.

Thanks to Jonni Good of Ultimate Paper Mache, who creates and sells spectacular animal mask patterns, which I used to create the Minotaur mask. To learn more about how I made the mask and labrys, watch this video in Alsos: The Patron Portal.