On Self-Expression | Studio Notes
10. New Moon - June 2025
“Who are you when you are not thinking yourself into existence?” —Adyashanti
Ian Boyden’s Eradicate the Self series of self-portrait sculptures is a meditation on the nature of self. His TED Talk on the topic is well worth a watch. For me, his work has prompted reflections on self-expression—thoughts I’ll be sharing here.
Boyden molds a stone after his own head, throws it in the river, and watches it erode under the relentless stream. The river chews him up, bit by bit, dispersing the self, sending it back to where it came from: its environment. He makes another one with seeds, and the birds peck at it. He becomes sky. He dissolves into an ancient Chinese garden, consumed by koi fish, and becomes sediment at the bottom of a pond. A bear devours his self-portrait, packed with dried fish and millet, and Boyden later finds bits of himself in a pile of scat.
Through this metaphor, Boyden challenges the conventional notion of the self as something fixed and separate—a tangible identity bundle with clear boundaries, looking out at a world of others—and instead reframes the self as “energy revealed by process,” a phrase I quite like. The self is in constant flux, pouring itself into the world as the world flows back into it. The self inhabits the world, and the world inhabits it, both inner and outer. Where do you draw the line?
For Boyden, his self-portrait consists of every minute transition and stage of transformation. What he’s saying is that only by “feeding” the self back into the environment can we become complete, expanded into who and what we truly are: interpenetrating, cannibalizing, propagating parts of one whole. The self endures only to the extent that it can ripple outward into the world, closing the gap between subject and object. Only then can the cycle fulfill itself.
“Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed” — Adrianne Lenker
If the self is a process, then what is self-expression? I tend to see it as sacred and driven by erotic energy. This creative, procreative force ensures our existence is generative, and when thwarted, leads to unease, aimlessness, depression, and dissatisfaction. In essence, the creative urge is this erotic life force seeking self-expansion; it is separation seeking wholeness. Yet, as Boyden’s self-portrait series reaffirms, the nature of self isn’t so clear-cut. Perhaps, self-expression is a means for us to find our edges and play with their porous nature.
In this vein, environmental writer Barry Lopez asks an interesting question:
“What if setting [environment] became a way of seeing, a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a different way to be in one’s body and inhabit a voice. What would that look like? What story would emerge?”
In my Corporeal Writing workshop, we explored what it might mean to write from a stance of environmental subjectivity—to give voice to the places that have gotten under our skin, that have shaped us, consumed us, and continue to inhabit us. The self is made up of stories. What if these stories are intentionally informed by a wider environment, in an attempt to identify with and give expression to a larger whole?
To me, this “whole” is multi-dimensional, encompassing as much of the inner, imaginary, and psychic realms as the tangible materiality of physical places: the land, wild and domesticated, urban places, streets, intersections, cafes, shops, town squares, gardens. Each place brims with psychic life, confers a subjectivity that is its own, and becomes “more of itself” as it mixes and combines with our unique subjective sense. How big a world can you sense, touch, and express through the medium of the self? How much of yourself can you pour into it?
As I see it, self-expression is a path of reciprocity. I suspect that deep down, the Self desires to be consumed by the World; the World is hungry for the Self. Our offerings flow out, like a let-down reflex, spurred by erotic love (biochemically known as oxytocin), and we feed the self back to where it belongs, circulating the energy onward, nourishing the whole, dissolving boundaries.
Let me know what you think <3
