Mirror Mirror in my phone 2024

Artist Statement: Constructing Online Personas in the Age of Instagram

By Rachael Ashley

In my ongoing research, I explore the creation of online identities as a tool for constructing entirely new personas within the confines of social media platforms, particularly Instagram. This project delves into how disembodied identities, freed from physical presence and personal detail, emerge through actions, words, and curated images. As a medium, Instagram provides a unique environment for exploration and self-presentation, allowing me to inhabit two distinct, constructed identities—personas that are devoid of my true background, location, and intimate self-revelations. Through these faceless performances, I seek to interrogate how users engage with fabricated personalities and how the platform, itself, functions both as a tool and as a curator of these identities.

This project acts in part as a social experiment, influenced by Cindy Sherman's photographic approach to identity. Sherman’s Film Stills series, where she adopts various cinematic personas while purposefully eschewing a personal or identifiable expression, deeply resonates with my own work. Like Sherman, my constructed characters do not reflect my personal identity but rather serve as performances of archetypes rooted in contemporary beauty standards, societal expectations, and the evolving language of social media. These self-created identities are intentionally vacuous—deliberately embodying the emptiness that arises when the culture industry dictates not just how we should look, but how we should be.

As I create these identities, I also engage with the disembodied nature of Instagram, a platform that often reduces human identity to images, likes, and comments. In doing so, I make a conscious effort to question and critique the roles I take on. The personas I cultivate do not represent a fully formed, lived reality. Instead, they perform for the viewer, often guided by the app’s algorithm, filters, and editing tools. This exploration of online identity highlights the interplay between personal autonomy and the surveillance mechanisms embedded within platforms like Instagram. Despite my attempts to control these identities, I do not fully own or dictate how they are perceived or disseminated. The algorithm ultimately plays a significant role in determining who interacts with my content and how it is received.

This tension between creation and control mirrors my own reflections on the male gaze—a theme central to Cindy Sherman’s work. In Film Stills, Sherman critiqued the objectification of women in mid-20th century cinema, showcasing figures who were vacant and non-subjective. Similarly, my work responds to the commodification of female identity through selfies, heavily filtered images, and altered faces that conform to the unattainable beauty ideals promoted by Instagram. Through the use of AI and Instagram’s built-in editing tools, I create characters that blend seamlessly into the platform’s beauty standards—smooth skin, flawless makeup, and pouted lips. Yet, as much as I try to stage these identities, they are inevitably shaped by the gendered expectations of the platform.

Incorporating AI-driven edits and filters into my process echoes the deeper discomfort with how women are expected to present themselves online. While the ability to control appearance seems empowering, it also raises questions about authenticity, representation, and the ethics of manipulation. The resulting portraits possess an unsettling, eerie quality, calling attention to the disconnection between the digital and the physical, and the tension between constructed beauty and personal truth. This is where the project confronts deeper issues about how online personas reflect not the true self, but a curated, often artificial performance.

However, as my experimental personas gained traction on the platform, the consequences of Instagram’s algorithm became evident. My project encountered suspicions of “catfishing” and fake accounts, resulting in the suspension and shadow-banning of the experimental profiles. This led to a deeper reflection on the surveillance and governance mechanisms of social media platforms—where artistic experimentation is often at odds with platform regulations. Instagram’s content moderation system, driven by inconsistent community guidelines, made it clear that pushing the boundaries of accepted digital behavior can result in the restriction or erasure of artwork that challenges mainstream norms.

In this way, Instagram does not just serve as a medium, but also acts as a participant in my art-making process. As much as I seek to construct and present new identities, the platform itself imposes constraints, surveillance, and control. In navigating these limitations, I reveal how identity is no longer something we simply construct but something dictated and surveilled by the very technologies we use to represent ourselves. This paradox—between autonomy and algorithm, self-expression and censorship—forms the heart of my artistic investigation.

Ultimately, this project seeks to critique the commodification of identity on Instagram and social media at large. By creating characters that embody archetypes shaped by modern beauty standards, I expose the ways in which identity becomes malleable, performative, and subject to external control. Through this ongoing art experiment, I ask: how much of our true selves are we willing to sacrifice for the pursuit of likes, followers, and validation? And what happens when the technology that enables our identities also controls their perception?

This project invites viewers to reflect on the fragmented nature of identity in the digital age, exploring the tensions between authenticity, performance, and the pervasive influence of social media algorithms on our self-presentation. It is a meditation on the shifting boundaries between who we are and who we appear to be, both online and in the world at large.

Archetypes within 2024

Artist Statement: Reflective Processes and Visual Enquiry – Archetypes Within
By Rachael Ashley

In this self-portrait series, Archetypes Within, I explore the complex relationship between femininity, identity, and the archetypes that shape our collective unconscious. Drawing from Carl Jung's theories on archetypes and Joseph Campbell's Hero’s Journey, my work examines the nuanced roles women play in both mythological and modern contexts. I question the pervasive narratives of femininity that have been passed down through history, asking how these archetypes manifest in popular culture and, more personally, within my own identity.

Throughout my life, I have struggled with categorizing myself into a single, definitive role. The pressures of defining my “authentic self” often left me feeling fragmented and elusive, as if I could never fully embody one archetype or role. It was through this personal struggle that I began to wonder: why do we, as humans, strive to fit neatly into predefined boxes? What happens when we challenge these fixed ideas of who we are? This project stems from that reflection, exploring how archetypes persist across culture and time, often without us even realizing their influence.

Jung’s theory of archetypes proposes that there are universal, inherited symbols and patterns that shape how we experience and understand the world. These archetypes live within us, guiding both our conscious and unconscious behaviour. In a similar vein, I was inspired by Joseph Campbell's work in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which highlights the journey of the hero—a universal narrative that often ignores the female experience. The “monomyth” Campbell describes has largely been cast in a masculine light, and feminist writers, such as Denise Leo, have called for an exploration of the “heroines’ journey,” a quest uniquely tied to the feminine. This gap in representation became the driving force behind my project.

For this reason, I chose to focus on seven archetypes that represent the many facets of womanhood: The Mother, Maiden, Lover, Queen, Huntress, Mystic, and Sage. These archetypes are not fixed identities but evolving stages, energies, and expressions that I, as a woman, can claim at different moments in my life. In my self-portraits, I embody these figures, infusing each with my personal interpretation and understanding of what they represent. These archetypes, rather than being fixed roles, serve as points of reflection and transformation.

The visual language of these works is deeply rooted in film, television, and storytelling traditions, where characters are often defined by a set of visual cues, costumes, and behaviours that audiences instantly recognize. Figures like Cindy Sherman, who used photography to deconstruct the roles women play in film and society, are a major influence on my work. In Untitled Film Stills, Sherman transforms herself into various characters from film noir, manipulating the conventions of Hollywood cinema to reveal the constructed nature of identity. Similarly, I strive to create images that convey a specific character, but with an element of mystery or discomfort—forcing the viewer to question the ease with which these archetypes are consumed.

Each of the portraits in this series has been carefully staged to evoke the visual language of cinematic stills, referencing well-known figures from art, mythology, and film. For example, my depiction of The Mother (fig. 4) draws upon Renaissance representations of the Virgin Mary, while The Lover channels the sensuality of ancient Greek and Roman goddess imagery, specifically Aphrodite. Colour plays a significant role in these portraits: The Lover is adorned in red, signalling passion and sexual power, while The Mystic is bathed in green, symbolizing spirituality and renewal. These choices are a nod to the psychological associations we make with colour, an idea that was influenced by my study of artists like Juno Calypso, whose playful, unsettling use of colour and space challenges traditional notions of femininity.

Each archetype I portray is a visual exploration of a moment in a woman’s life—a phase, a transition, a role we embody but never fully claim. By using myself as the subject, I aim to illustrate how these archetypes are not simply external labels but internal constructs that we carry with us, often unconsciously. In this way, my work also speaks to the tension between identity and expectation. How do we balance the roles we are assigned with the ones we create for ourselves?

This project has challenged me to delve deeper into the psychology of the self and the complexities of identity. As I move between these various characters, I find that I am not just representing archetypes but am becoming them. By embodying each role, I hope to illuminate the power of choice and transformation within the archetypal framework, reminding viewers that while we may inherit these narratives, we are also free to redefine them.

In this exploration of self and myth, I return again to the words of Joseph Campbell, who asserts that “mythological figures… are not only the symptoms of the unconscious, but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles.” My work seeks to uncover and question these principles, asking: What happens when we reimagine the feminine archetypes? What new possibilities for identity and self-expression can emerge when we allow ourselves to embody these roles, not as fixed, static identities, but as living, evolving stories?

The journey to complete this series has been both revealing and difficult—each portrait an attempt to distil complex emotions and experiences into one simple visual truth. Yet, as a collective whole, these images illustrate how archetypes are not restrictive but expansive. We can choose, we can transition, and we can own the narratives we live. Ultimately, Archetypes Within is an exploration of identity, self-authorship, and the power of myth, as I continue to examine and reimagine the ways in which we are all shaped by the stories we inherit.