What Makes You You? Each answer acts as an inspiration for me to create a unique digital image.

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number 728
So what makes me to me…To say that my life is kind of schizophrenic would be not enough, I play and live so much different roles. I’am a academics, writer, art historian and curator in contemporary arts but also finding my own artistic practice as a autodidactic painter. Between theory and practice I’am also mother, wife and a woman. Always depending on the situation, I’am a different person. The only thing that remains in every role that I play is my passion for the things, my sensitivity and sometimes my affectivity, which bring’s me often to new ways of thinking and recognizing the world I live in.
inspired by Elisabeth Saubach

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number 724
I think I am born out of my connections with other people and things in a  Spinozistic sense. “A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest by another body, which has also been determined to motion and that again by another and so on to infinity”. I think that’s a pretentious way of saying “other people”.
inspired by Alex Pearl   ‘

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number 715
I sometimes imagine if we have a invisible filter built in our mind. The filter is made out of what we’re born with, experience in early/formative years, our heritage & upbringing, etc… expanding with ongoing life experiences. We face outside influences everyday, but I believe what’s coming through this internal special filter, makes me me.
inspired by Yoko Isami

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number 712
I guess Time, Place & Experiences. & Relationships but they probably come under experiences. Time – growing up, being around for as long as I have! Place – has provided an environment & location and everything both filters through & creates the experiences which is what makes me/me! Not sure if that’s what you’re after?
inspired by Bill Heard 

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number 708
The biggest factor in my life I think that has made me who I am has been my lack of confidence in myself, stemmed from childhood of being abused no way a child ever should and re-enforced by my parents telling me to stay put of sight and unheard alone in my room because I was an embarrassment. This of course lent me to another to a world of imagination, drawing and painting, and be resourceful. I could escape in story. For years as an adult I held the belief that I am not good enough for a career or love or friend ship. Leading me to push others away, lie about myself and not try hard to achieve because I would just fail anyway. I still don’t like to be touched if I don’t trust the person. These days I have learnt how to talk to people more, I have been in a relationship for a number of years now. I have been building up practice in drawing and painting again. It was the thing I wanted to be doing but never could because of self doubt. I think most of all what makes me the person who I am is my imagination and my resourcefulness.
inspired by Anthony Osman

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number 707


The distant place,
Lofty and secure destiny—
Snow all year round —

Streams of meltwater,
Running past the mother’s feet,
There she bathed,
Cover me with afterbirth.

Cold springs,
Wrapped around me,
My cry,
Fall to,
Stone crevices at the bottom of mountain streams and deep pools.

On the swaddle of the world,
Embroidered with fire and camellia,
Hung with silver bells,
Twinkling like a star.

Can’t wrap up the night,
Listen,
It is the forbidden glare,
I use “Hello! Say goodbye.

A path with ferns,
Often collapsed，
Lust,
A pastoral hidden in the monsoon.

In its purest form,
Scattered by the soil in the wind,
However,
My shape remains the same,
I’m good for nothing.

As a result,
Cold soul,
Gradually plump in the forgotten.

inspired by Xi Guanlei

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number 706
I am a collection of material with ‘potential’.  My base substance is formed from parental genetic material plus any congenital anomalies. Thereafter, social and environmental conditions (experiences, events, things witnessed) become inscribed on my psyche and determine my behaviours/psychological rules for living. One is not conscious of what the developing mind sublimates – which raises the question, how far are thoughts and actions one’s own or the product of structural influences?  I feel that I am largely shaped by the temporal context, which can be unnerving because it’s difficult to describe who you are, but it does enables me to be responsive and to develop. I acknowledge that there is no deep identity truth that I have to identify with but rather an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with:- the ‘big Other’, a void (it is explained differently by various philosophers, psychologists, theoreticians).  Ethel Adnan said, “Your identity is your prison”.  Being human (having a conscience) comes with consequences.
inspired by Anne Stansfield