Eleen Deprez and Michael Newall
July 2025
That word, person, comes from prosopon, or, written in the original Greek, πρόσωπον. Prosopon means mask. In Ancient Greek theatre, actors wore masks that represented exaggerated facial expressions to indicate their characters’ emotional states. It’s curious, and perhaps telling, that our word person derives from this — not from any revelation of our true self, but from the roles we play, the appearances we present, the masks we wear.
Personhood is important. It is persons (people seems too off-hand as the plural form in this context) that have rights and responsibilities (often abused and shirked as they may be). It is persons that we are supposed to value as “ends in themselves”, so says Kant. Persons, unlike most other things, are not fungible – any person, no matter who they may be, is irreplaceable, and their loss irredeemable. Just having consciousness, even a mind, isn’t enough for personhood. Animals, on the whole, are not regarded as persons. But the youngest of infants is a person, and this personhood, it seems, can only be lost through death – we remain persons through coma and dementia, and perhaps only brain death can relieve us of our personhood without also relieving us of our lives.
There are many different ways of being a person. Most of us are thrown into our identities and come to discover its boons and constraints as we grow. We find how we are tied into, constrained and shaped by the particular social structures of the societies of which we are part, and in ways that may deny us the rights of personhood that many others of us take for granted. In this sense, to speak of personhood as a fact aloof from society and history is to misrepresent it. But it cannot simply be dispensed with on this account. The concept of personhood is key for progressive discourses around identity, for it is one’s fundamental status as a person, deserving the same respect, rights and opportunities as others, that usually justifies progressive action.
That is all to say that our personhood is, in our ordinary ways of thinking, an essential element of ourselves. Without it, I am no longer me – indeed, I would no longer be anyone. I would be – what then? Just matter? Organic stuff? An object? An animal? A fleshy automaton? A mask, with nothing behind it? Whatever the answer, I would find myself, in Bataille’s words, with “no rights in any sense”, apt to get “squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.” [1]
If one recognises these doubts and destabilising anxieties around one’s sense of self, then one will probably also recognise that personhood is a flimsier, more vulnerable state than our culture requires. If we understand the old idea of the soul – immortal and invulnerable (though apt to sin) – as a template for our current conception of a person, we might also understand how the loss of this belief places pressure on our conception of personhood. Is each of us truly a single individual, the same person as a child, or ten years in the future, as we are now? What happens when we sleep, when we are under anaesthesia, or the influence of other drugs, or when we suffer from amnesia, associative personality disorder, or dementia, or when we undergo a transformative personal experience? [2] Some will say that the self comes apart under these circumstances. And if that is literally so, then personhood is not inviolable like the soul of Christianity, but rather fluctuating, performative, unreliable and inconstant.
It is apt that the image of the mask – the prosopon – and costuming, performance, artifice and transformation are ways of exploring and invoking this latter – and we think truer – sense of personhood. There is play and whimsy here, and there is also a sense of uncanny and dread. The self appears as a mask, a persona, it multiplies, it disappears. Presence becomes absence. Elsewhere that absence of the self can suggest some kind of threat – a threat to the image’s subject, or to ourselves, of dissolution, sickness, decay, or even some kind of malign supernatural presence, an inversion, one might say, of the notion of the soul on which our dearly held conceptions of the self are based.
Move through the exhibition and your gaze will be held and mirrored. As you look at and interpret representations of faces and bodies, expression and posture, you will be stared at and seen. The photographic medium intensifies this awareness beyond what we ordinarily experience in life, bringing with it a heightened awareness of these states and the complex dynamic they create. There are several self-images here, although none presented recognisably. Brianna Speight, Kasia Töns, and Gerwyn Davies model or perform in their own work. These are carefully constructed artifices, in some cases artificial personae, and in others elaborate decor for the self to disappear into.
Kasia Töns’ photographic and photo-based works have their origins in a project developed over fifteen years ago, during a period of profound isolation. At the time, Töns began stitching masks, a surrogate companion, as a way of navigating and exploring feelings of alienation and disconnection from the world. Now, years later and embedded within a supportive network of close friends, Töns revisits those masks. She invited friends to wear them, selecting specific masks for each, and through a collaborative process posing each model in a setting. The resulting staged portrait images – printed on canvas – retain some aspects of the encounter and exchange between the artist and sitter. In one, through a gauze of flynet, we can make out a broadly smiling face giving us a glimpse of the warm interaction between photographer and sitter. In others, only small parts of the subject’s skin or hair peep through. The masks themselves recall those of shamanic cultures. Stitched and assembled from various materials, they read as ritualistic objects, not so much masks that project an identity or emotion but rather as vessels that contain or restrain an (in most cases benevolent) spirit. On the plinth, a photograph, Martha (also the title of the entire series), shows Kasia herself in a cone-shaped pointed hat with a wisp of white fabric trailing over its peak, reminiscent of a medieval hennin. She walks away from the camera, pulling a trolley laden with suitcases, suggesting an escape, emancipation or refuge. In response to the ambiguity of the photographic moment, and an impulse to care for the work materially, Töns has embellished and stitched the surface of the textile prints by hand. The portraits occupy a charged space. As masked portraits, they deliberately obscure the facial features of the sitter – disrupting the conventional function of portraiture as the production of a recognisable likeness, and the expression of a personality (which is also to say a person, as theorised, for instance, by Cynthia Freeland). And yet, in conversation with Töns, it becomes clear that these images are not meant to conceal or obliterate selves but offer an alternative mode of revealing them. The way each sitter responds to and inhabits the mask – their posture, their presence – becomes, in its own right, a form of expression, legible to those appropriately cued.
In Deborah Paauwe’s photographs, too, we encounter the mask. In Evenings Edge 1, a young girl is pictured sitting against a stone wall, perched atop a thick, cascading carpet of succulent groundcover. She wears a vintage silk dress: its seams frayed, the fabric thin, translucent in places, browned by age and wear. Once a festive garment – perhaps a modest wedding dress, a bridesmaid’s outfit, or a confirmation gown – it is now ghostly, its delicacy worn down by time. Over her face, she wears a contemporary press-moulded plastic mask. It reminds me of the ones worn during carnaval and Masjer’n in my hometown Poperinge – unlike the elegant Venetian Carnival masks these are cheaply produced and often represent popular figures. [3] The one worn in Evenings Edge 1 and 2 represents a prototypical fairytale princess: straw-coloured hair, cartoonish lashes, a bright pink bow. The mask only covers the upper half of her face – leaving nose, mouth, and chin exposed. Through the eyeholes, we catch her gaze: brownish, unmoored, and slightly misaligned with the cutouts. One eye is half-obscured. The mask doesn’t fit. Beneath the blond hair of the mask, the sitter’s own dark brown hair escapes. Her mouth is unsmiling; her hands are clasped tightly in her lap, her fingernails bitten short. The image is quietly unsettling. Femininity here is not just adorned but performed. Set in a domestic garden space, the composition’s softness and subdued palette recall a Pre-Raphaelite sensibility, but the gaudy mass-produced mask introduces an unresolved contrast. It’s as though the performance of girlhood has hardened into ritual: exhausted or outgrown. In Purple Mountain, from the series The Painted Mirror, the confrontation is more formal. A young woman, dressed in a sequinned, bare-shouldered costume – white with red glittering floral accents – stands before a dark curtain. She holds up a hand-painted fan, obscuring her face. The vintage fan depicts an alpine landscape: pine trees, still water, a pink-tinged mountain peak, rendered in a nostalgic style of tourist souvenirs or ceramic plates. Here too, the self is withheld. The gesture is precise, almost reverent – the fan held carefully aloft in both hands, like a substitute for the actual face. If the image again evokes femininity, it is a femininity mediated by props, by inherited poses, by scenes borrowed from someone else’s imagination. Together, these works articulate the dissonance between presentation and presence, surface and self. In Paauwe’s images, the mask is not simply a concealment – it’s a device through which a person is both protected and revealed.
Gerwyn Davies is both a photographer and costume maker, practices that speak clearly in his two works here. Like others in the series Heatwave, these are images of Davies himself. The images look editoral, high fashion, camp or perhaps artpop. The costumes in which he appears are ornamental and architectural and completely over-the-top. They are, on any day, a bold statement. But at the same time, they form protective bubbles, almost like a cocoon, completely obscuring the model. The glitzy colours, manicured settings, and outrageous costume embody an exuberant camp aesthetic. As Hamish Sawyer notes: “In Gerwyn Davies’ photographic images, the grammar of camp becomes an approach to image-making.” I identify the pineapple, prominent in one of Davies’ images here, as the ‘Bigger Than Average Pineapple’ at the Shell service station in Ballina, NSW. In the other, a large plastic container of milk spills onto the asphalt, a shopping cart standing abandoned on the desiccated nature strip nearby.
Brianna Speight’s works are drawn from her series Hypersaline Drool, made during a residency at the British School at Rome. The photographs are highly and visibly constructed: theatrical tableaux composed of fabrics, soft sculptural forms, painted body parts, carefully placed props, and natural elements. Speight assembles these elements into surreal images full of saturated colours that blur the line between still life and self-portrait. Her palette is deliberately garish, evoking Disney sea-creature cosplay. Across the series, the human body becomes unstable: fragmented, recombined, and rearranged. In one work, Hydro Hybrid I, the forms are posed with precision, mimicking architectural motifs – columns, friezes, cartouches. The body here is not cohesive, but rather ornamental, gestural, theatrical. It is both a structure and a site of feeling. In conversation, Speight reflects on one image in particular Soft Karst which shows cut-out octopus parts – and the childhood memory that inspires it. During a family holiday on the Limestone Coast, she accidentally caught an octopus while fishing. The unexpected catch caused a flurry of panic and fascination. Her brother, not her, was given the task of handling the slimy creature and placing it in a bag – an early, quietly formative moment of gendered division. The memory surfaces in the work – not literally, but in the textures and mood of the composition: the drama, the mess, the tension between power and vulnerability. These images, Speight explains, are portraits of a kind, reframing past experiences and emotional residues. Through fragmentation and staging, they embody a process of reflection, a way to reclaim and retell.
The celebrated photographer Polixeni Papapetrou, who passed away in 2018, is represented here by a group of artist proofs—smaller versions of editioned photographs that she gifted to fellow artists or traded for other works. In Study for Hattah Man and Hattah Woman, two figures wear ghillie suits, a kind of camouflage clothing designed to help the wearer blend into foliage. But here they stand upright in a barren landscape, their humanoid forms clearly visible, breaking the illusion. A strong wind pushes the loose netting of the suits, and they appear like eerie plant-people. Papapetrou’s The Watcher, from the series In Between Worlds, belongs to what she described as a “theatrical bestiary.” In her artist statement, Papapetrou explains that the children in these images are portrayed as animals to reflect their “magical affinity” with the non-human world. “Children wear animal masks,” she writes, “allowing them to inhabit an intermediary position that separates them from adults and human from animal.” These hybrid figures occupy a liminal space—between child and adult, animal and human, myth and reality. “They perform identities other than their own,” Papapetrou continues, “transgressing boundaries and blurring the lines between fantasy/theatre, mythology/reality, archetype/play, male/female, child/adult and animal/human.” Through costume, landscape, and performance, her photographs become tableaux of transformation and ambiguity, where the line between representation and identity is continually destabilised.
In a collaborative installation, Alice McCool and Yusuf Ali Hayat transform The Little Machine’s Cabinet into a religious shrine from the Neapolitan backstreets. At its centre is the mythic figure of Argentinian football player Diego Maradona. Maradona’s career occupies a prominent place in the cultural mythology of international football. At the height of his success, he played for S.S.C. Napoli, leading the club to its first-ever Serie A championship in 1987 – an event that cemented his status as a local hero in Naples. However, it was during the 1986 FIFA World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England that Maradona became a globally polarising figure. In what would become one of the most controversial moments in football history, he scored a goal using his hand – an act in clear violation of the rules, yet missed by match officials. Maradona later described it as having been scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God”. This moment, laced with political tension in the wake of the Falklands War, elevated Maradona beyond the realm of sport. He became not just a footballer, but a symbol, a martyr, a god. In Naples, his image is ubiquitous – on socks, keychains, scarfs, statues, and other cheap souvenirs – and DIY street murals. Sometimes he’s instantly recognisable; other times it’s just the pale blue and white stripes, or the number 10. Many of these unsanctioned examples of street art have become sites of pilgrimage for sport fans. The adoration of Maradona goes further than simply football, it has become religious, literally. In 1998 Iglesia Maradoniana (the Church of Maradona) was founded, which has its own ten commandments (I leave it to the reader to look them up).
McCool and Hayat’s installation revels in this messy, devotional energy. It’s part shrine, part parody, part anthropological display. In the eleven photographs on the wall, all taken in the streets of Naples, and – for those familiar with the game – arranged in a telling formation, we are as much drawn to the tourists as to the memorabilia. Inside the shrine on the back wall a dopey-looking ceramic Maradona on a shelf and kitschy white porcelain candlesticks stand in front of a small, framed picture. This, positioned where a saint’s portrait would normally be, is a photograph taken by Hayat of a mosaic found in Naples, one of many iterations of street-level Maradona worship. McCool and Hayat invite us to delight in the absurdity of idolisation and also the spectacle of commercial tourism. But at the same time they are sincere in their adoration for the football legend. Their installation blurs the line between the sacred and the profane, between sincere devotion and kitsch spectacle.
From the perspective of Prosopon, there are other readings too. The image of Maradona has become replicated to the point where it barely functions as the face of a person; it is now more like a sign or symbol. Where the loss of personhood will leave most of us as in a state of abject animality at best, for Maradona, his personhood is a mere contingency, that can only hold him back from his real destiny. Unshackled from his status as a person in any meaningful sense that we can understand, he is freed into a hyperreality in which his immortality is assured.
Notes
- In L’Informe [Formless] (1929)
2.Descartes is one source of the idea of a person’s essence as soul-like, and for a contemporary account which understands the self as a continuous stream of consciousness, see Barry Dainton. The view of the self as shifting, contingent and inconstant is also old – see Locke, Hume’s ‘bundle’ theory of the self, and more recently Derek Parfit.
3. Masjer’n along with its regional variants in other Flemish communities, takes place on the Saturday night of the annual Carnaval festivities. The freshly elected Prince Carnaval is ceremonially handed the keys to the city, symbolically unleashing an all-night celebration. Participants don masks to indulge in excessive drinking, eating, and other pleasures they will forgo during Lent. Historically, Masjer’n was also a time for airing public grievances and hurling insults that had been bottled up over the year — a tradition that has lost some of its bite now that participants must register and wear identification tags at all times.