Dissatisfactions and aspirations in pen and ink

At the beginning of the present century, the artist, writer and curator Deanna Petherbridge took the very untypical decision to make a self-portrait. But in this drawing she is almost impossible to recognise. With a characteristically incisive attention to detail, Petherbridge shows her head packed with books, all clamouring to be read. She is also muffled with a bandage-like material covering her mouth, and her eyes gaze out through multiple lenses. As Gill Perrys essay points out in this illum