Take a look at her self-portrait.

by Joanne O'Sullivan

photo by Rene TreeceIn the vast sea of self-identity, a person’s appearance might represent just one tiny wave on the surface. Women artists have a long history of using their own images as a jumping-off point for exploring what’s beneath. Frida Kahlo painted numerous self-portraits that expressed her inner physical and emotional pain. Photographers Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee have made careers out of photographing themselves in different personae that comment on (among other things) stereotypes and perceptions of women. While it seems these days that everyone is making self-portraits for online profile pictures, it’s still a form that women artists use to search for deeper meanings beyond what meets the eye.

Asheville photographer and digital artist Jenny Bowen is perhaps best known for her Faces of Asheville project, which debuted in June. She spent two years photographing more than 400 local residents as a way to capture a sense of who the town was at a particular moment in time. At times of transition in her own life, Bowen turns the camera lens on herself, too. “Your ‘self’ is fluid. It’s always changing,” Bowen says. Self-portraits have helped her document those changes. When embarking on the Faces of Asheville, she photographed herself as “the entertainer,” using Old West imagery—partly just because she likes it, but also to express the gamble she was taking with the project. When she started campaigning for a spot on Asheville’s City Council last summer, the self-portrait on her campaign poster featured Bowen in a red hat. She wore the hat to campaign events so that people could recognize her from the photo. While she later withdrew from the race due to a difficult pregnancy, she still has the photo to remind her of that time in her life.

At the start of each new year, Bowen, who’s 28, does a self-portrait that reflects her concerns of the moment: a Che Guevara-style portrait during a period of great political involvement, a nostalgic-looking portrait using the artistic conventions of previous generations to ponder what it means to be a Millennial. Although she hasn’t done a self-portrait during her pregnancy, she expects that she will someday document her transition to motherhood. The “immediacy of digital,” she says, makes looking at the self at different times and in different ways much more common for artists of her generation.

While Bowen’s self-portraiture is primarily documentary, Asheville artist Ginger Graziano’s is metaphorical in nature. A professional graphic designer, Graziano has been working in clay for 14 years, but she also paints, writes poetry and is working on a memoir. When her 19-year-old son died from a brain tumor, making art became a critical part of the process of grieving, healing and rebuilding her life, which then led to her move from New York to Asheville eight years ago. Classes at Odyssey Center for Ceramic Arts not only helped her hone her skills, but also provided her with a supportive community in her new hometown.

A sculpture called Rebirth, says Graziano, wasn’t intended to be a self-portrait, but as she worked on it, she realized that’s what it was. “Aspects of myself came through subconsciously—some that I didn’t even know about yet,” she says. Graziano found that her artistic choices reflected deeply rooted parts of her identity. The eyes in the figure’s breasts evolved because she sees with the most nurturing part of herself, and the figure in the womb holding the lotus flower (a symbol of spiritual awakening) is her new self, birthed by the old. While nothing in the piece overtly resembles Graziano physically, the piece captures the essence of her inner landscape.

Asheville fiber artist Jen Swearington stitches mixed-media quilts using all sorts of material to create evocative textured surfaces. Her fashion line includes hand-dyed, silk-based garments like shirts, skirts and jackets, and accessories such as scarves, ties and belts. But she also creates fine art pieces in which she juxtaposes images to create a dream-like composition, stitching and painting images over and into the fabric. While her work is not overly preoccupied with identity and self, she has at times included herself in the equation in both subtle and more obvious ways. In A Grain of Salt, she traced her own shadow and sewed it into the piece. “For about the last six years, when I travel, I’ve always photographed my shadow—or more recently, my reflection—on something distinctly of that place, like a wall covered with graffiti or a long shadow on a beach,” she says. “It marks my presence without the cheesy grin.”

In Self Help, Swearington’s presence is overt, positioned over a 1950s graphic of a woman sweeping an injured man away from a lamp from which he received an electric shock. The image shows a different side of the artist—one that others rarely see. While much of her work is nostalgic, with an underlying sweetness and innocence, this piece is more brooding. “Self Help is from a darker time in my life and was reworked a couple of years after originally making it because it was so sad,” says Swearington. “But I think it was one of the most powerful pieces I’ve made. It was cathartic.”

That’s a common function in self-portraiture: working out issues, purging or rebuilding. But, Bowen says, whether the intention is to record the experience and reality of the moment or to delve beneath the surface of the image, each piece an artist makes contains part of her identity. “You always put yourself in there,” she says.