2025 | Sole Author | In progress
Figure 1. Self-portraits (140 drawings) as data. Corpus of 140 hand-drawn self-portraits treated as data, forming the input space for computational embedding and clustering of boundary configurations.
Atlas of Self Boundaries is a research-through-drawing project that investigates how emotional and perceptual boundaries are enacted, repeated, and transformed. The work explores boundaries —between self and other, observer and observed, body and environment—not as fixed separations, but as dynamic configurations that emerge through material practice and perceptual apparatuses. In this case, through self-portraits. It does so starting with a set of 140 self-portrait sketches drawn over a period of twelve months.
The project aims to explore concepts drawn from Karen Barad’s agential realism which, drawing explicitly from quantum physics, argues that entities do not preexist their interactions but emerge through intra-actions, in which matter, meaning, and agency are co-constituted by material–discursive practices shaped by measurement, observation, and experimental apparatuses.
Drawing functions are understood as site of inquiry alongside formal scientific background: a space where emotional states materialize without prior logical structuring. In these drawings, boundaries are viewed as material behaviors—line density, rupture, overlap, erasure, compression, and diffusion—rather than symbolic representations. The project asks whether such boundary behaviors can be understood spatially: can emotional permeability be modeled as a field, learned from repeated enactments, and mapped without semantic labeling?
The project is based on a corpus of 140+ hand-drawn self-portraits produced through a sustained daily practice, mostly in black and white ink, understood as boundary studies.