This work examines the gaze and the relationship between body and face in portraiture. Originally drawing from 1980s-style floating head portraits where separating the head from the body creates a strange psychological distance, this piece was also influenced by contemporary projection-based portrait images where faces are cast onto bodies, turning representation into a literal act of overlay.

Projection became central to my approach because it shifts the image from surreal distortion into physical intervention. A projected face exists in real space and carries social implications, particularly around gender and spectatorship. This piece shows a woman’s body without visible eyes, with face projected onto her back. Because of the confrontation of the projected gaze, the body cannot be passively consumed. It instead becomes an active surface that unexpectedly returns the gaze.

This gesture restructures the usual power dynamic of viewing the female body in art. Traditionally positioned as an object of voyeuristic looking, the figure here functions instead as a site of image-making. The body becomes a canvas rather than the artwork itself, redirecting attention from passive display to active meaning. Granting the figure a projected face disrupts the expectation that she exists only to be looked at and reasserts agency within the viewing exchange.

The title, Body of Work, reinforces these layered meanings. It refers both to an artistic output and to the physical body as a working surface. “Work” suggests labor and function as much as art-making, complicating the tradition of treating the female body as purely aesthetic. The title holds these tensions in place: body as object, body as maker, and body as site of representation.