Self-Severance

Daniella Mills

2026

Self Portrait – Cyanotype & Collage on mixed media paper

700 x 1000mm

 ‘Self-Severance’ explores fragments of my own body using a glitched photogrammetry model, digitally disrupted before being reassembled through collage and printed as a cyanotype. Using a technology designed to reconstruct a subject, I instead embrace its failure, allowing the fractured form to reflect how digital technologies simultaneously promise coherence while producing increasingly fragmented experiences of identity.

The process resembles code obfuscation: scrambling computer code so that it becomes difficult for humans to read or interpret, while the programme continues to function. Similarly, my models become difficult to decipher and navigate; yet retain traces of the self within their distortion. 

I begin to reconstruct the self through collage and cyanotype printing process, taking these fragments of the self to build my identity into one that I recognise. I take the approach of reconstructing the fragmented during exposure, the reassembled fragments are constructed into a form that I recognise as my own identity.