What does each layer give her, and what does it take away?

The Missing Layer is an ongoing series about the identities women carry, and the relationships that gave them to us.

A woman is rarely seen simply as herself. She is seen through the roles she inhabits: daughter, partner, wife, mother, professional, lover, caretaker. Each relationship hands her a face, and each face asks something different of her. She is expected to be beautiful, but not consumed by beauty. Strong, but never difficult. Independent, but always available. Needed in one room, desired in another, and somehow always enough. (Read Chapter 5: What does each layer give her…)

The demand is not simply to be a woman. It is to be the right kind of woman, for everyone, at once.

Each role becomes another layer. Some are chosen. Some are inherited. Some are imposed. Others are worn for so long that we forget where the role ends and we begin.

The series does not search for one authentic woman hidden beneath the layers. Identity is never singular, and not every layer needs to be removed. The woman is not underneath; she is the one who can notice. The works return to that moment of noticing: the pause in which a layer is looked at, understood, and then kept, reshaped or set down.

The works are built the way identity is built: in layers. Surfaces are built up, covered, interrupted and sealed. What lies beneath is never gone, only seen through whatever came after. Found objects, newspaper fragments, photographic imagery, typography, raw wood, paint and gold are not decoration. They are traces of forgotten lives, public voices and fragile beauty. Resin adds a final layer that belongs to the viewer: depending on the angle, we see the work, or ourselves.

The materials behave like the women within the works: layered, contradictory, vulnerable, resistant and constantly becoming.

The series moves through different states of womanhood: social performance, beauty and desire, intimacy, love, rejection, escape, motherhood, invisibility and the search for an identity beyond assigned roles. It does not offer a single image of womanhood. It shows its contradictions: beauty and exhaustion, desire and restraint, strength and vulnerability, performance and the person behind it.

The Missing Layer is an invitation to pause. Not to be told who to become, but to ask which layers we would choose again.

The question is not whether we can return to the woman we were before the world began to shape us. It is whether, among everything we have learned to be, we can still recognise ourselves, and choose.

ARTWORK DETAILS

Title: Hi Folks!
Collection: The Missing Layer
Year: 2026
Medium: Mixed media assemblage on raw wood: gold leaf, resin, paint, newspaper fragments, found objects. 
Size: 53.5 x 66 cm
Print Enquiries: hello@mytravelspaces.com

ARTWORK DETAILS

Title: Face-Off
Collection: The Missing Layer
Year: 2026
Medium: Mixed media assemblage on raw wood: gold leaf, resin, paint, newspaper fragments, found objects. 
Size: 80 x 106 cm
Print Enquiries: hello@mytravelspaces.com

ARTWORK DETAILS

Title: Love/unLOVE
Collection: The Missing Layer
Year: 2026
Medium: Mixed media assemblage on raw wood: gold leaf, resin, paint, newspaper fragments, found objects. 
Size: 79 x 40 cm
Print Enquiries: hello@mytravelspaces.com