one hundred headless women

2026, —

medium
sculpture / mixed media
materials
cardboard, paint, thread, fabric and mixed materials
format
expanding series of one hundred figures
status
ongoing

One hundred headless women is an evolving sculptural and mixed-media series of composite female figures constructed from cardboard, paint, and stitched joints. Each figure follows an imagined body and position, deliberately rendered without a head. The absence of the head shifts attention away from individual likeness and towards the body as a site of identity, anonymity, fragmentation, and loss of self. The figures may be understood as singular bodies or as interchangeable possibilities: one woman, any woman, or the self dispersed across many bodies.

The figures are drawn and painted onto cardboard, cut out, and joined through visible stitching. While initially conceived as predominantly flat constructions, the series is gradually expanding into more sculptural and three-dimensional forms. The material process mirrors the conceptual concerns of the work: bodies are separated, reconstructed, joined, and accumulated through repeated acts of making.

The project is conceived as a constellation of one hundred figures. The number functions both as a direct reference to Max Ernst’s collage novel (La Femme 100 têtes, 1929) and as an open framework for accumulation and the possibility of completeness. Repetition does not produce identical bodies but gathers variations of the same imagined form, accumulating gestures, identities, possibilities, fragments, losses, and attempts at reconstruction.

Drawing on surrealist and material traditions of the fragmented body, the series reconsiders these through an open-ended language of loss, reconstruction, and abstraction. Although rooted in personal experiences of grief and uncertainty around identity, the figures remain deliberately non-specific. Their anonymity allows the work to move beyond an individual narrative, inviting the viewer to consider their own relationship to identity, absence, embodiment, and the possibility of becoming whole.