Fatma Ummanel

A vast part of my learning this past year has been heavily influenced by my personal therapy and clinical practice with clients. Integral to managing my anxieties at the interface of my therapeutic relationships has been to learn to sit with my own inadequacies, within My Self. Painting portraits of others has historically felt natural to me as an artist, yet observing myself was unknown to me. The artworks are an extension of previous explorations of belonging and cultural identity through landscapes depicting the meeting of land and sea. This year I have been working on building my internal capacity for compassion, inner strength and containment. Working across mediums of; watercolour, pencil and paint, my self-portraits explore the fluidity, fragility, authenticity within the emerging Self-states. As I think about how I see myself, how others see me and how I identify with these perceptions, in socio-cultural contexts.