Olive STEYN

Facilitator: “a person or thing that makes an action or process easy or easier” [Oxford, 2025].

 Facilitator is a series that subverts the self-portrait; it is an attempt to show the breakdown/decontextualisation of myself in the process of communication and connection: how am I perceived and how do I embody the roles assigned to me?  The entire body of work uses imagery of my own body, fragmented in a way that transforms each “portrait” into a specimen rather than a person.

The collection explores the idea of ease and understanding by taking the familiar subject of the body and breaking it down into something unrecognisable through the use of softground body impressions, hardground etchings, cyanotypes, and my own medical scans, all etchings being printed in Prussian and Ultramarine Blue to reference the colour’s connotations of clarity, truth, obscurity, melancholy, and depth.