When Art Stares Back At You

Between Self-Care and Self-Surveillance: The Art and Horror of Seeing and Being Seen.

Every woman knows the mirror ritual: peering in close, pulling the skin taut, hunting for clogged pores, rogue hairs, fresh spots, discoloration—or worst of all, that dreaded “dullness” we’ve been trained to fear.

Conveniently, the cure is always at arm’s reach: a serum at Sephora, a holistic elixir from Instagram (ingredients allegedly in my fridge—bold assumption). Self-care and commerce, insecurity and attention, self-worth and scrutiny all blur together in this endless loop. Issy Wood paints self-portraits that exist in this very muddle, and crucially, she makes sure you know she’s watching.

The watcher watching the watched. I can barely keep track.

This take goes into some weird places, so I recommend you lock in. We’re going to hit on all my favourites – the horror and banality of womanhood, perception, Severance, Instagram Face, Jenny Saville, The Overstory and Harry Potter. I wish I was making this up.

Issy Wood, Self portrait 52, 2023, Oil on linen, 215 x 175 x 5 cm. Image © Issy Wood, 2023

It all started with this painting I saw on Tiktok. Issy Wood’s Self Portrait 52. I know, heaven forbid I don’t slyly try to claim “I read this article” to mask my own intellectual provenance.

It was the mossy, moldy, delicious green that caught me first. Then it was her eyes that stopped me.

The painting fills your screen up with an odd familiarity. How many selfies have I taken in this exact pose performing this exact action - self-care. The slight dullness in her gaze, the “flat ennui” has stared back at me from my iPhone anytime my camera app has the audacity to flip to the front view. Which honestly, always rude.

Self-Care, Self-Surveillance and Who is Watching

Wood’s self-portrait stinks of performative self-care, a ritual that disguises critique as indulgence. We lean too close to the mirror, checking for imperfections, because we’ve internalized that we should feel like the girls on our screens: the poreless, glass-skinned paragons of ‘clean girls’. These are beauty rituals, yes, but they are also acts of self-surveillance.

There are so many layers of gazes in this portrait, it’s dizzying. Wood looks at herself through the mirror. You look at Wood looking at herself. Wood is looking at you looking at her looking at herself, through your phone. Nevermind, when you add in the infinite layers of conversation between societal beauty expectations and your reflection that happens every time a woman looks in the mirror.

No wonder we all end up distorted. The multiple levels of translation between artist, subject and viewer are getting scrambled in the User Interface code that brought them all together.

Liminality, Simulacrum, and the Horror of Instagram FaceOk, this is where we go off the deep end.

If you’ve been devouring Severance’s second season, you’ll know this feeling: watching yourself through a distorted mirror, the face looking back unrecognizable yet unnervingly familiar. Issy Wood’s self-portrait operates in this same uneasy, liminal space—a self both intimate and alien, cared for yet neglected, observed and obscured. Innie and Outie, if that means anything to you.

Her work has always felt like a perversion of reality—familiarity gone sour. Here, self-care is not the luminous, soft-focus indulgence the wellness industry peddles but a kind of mechanical maintenance, a ritual bordering on obsession. The face is seen but not necessarily recognized.

The sitter in this portrait isn’t just looking at herself. She is evaluating herself against Instagram Face — a hyper-smooth, symmetrical, algorithm-friendly amalgamation of idealized beauty. The cheekbones sharpened, the buccal fat removed, the eyes fox-lifted into eerie precision.

Don’t even get me started on the AI aspect to this because YIKES. FYI my prompt here was literally the paragraph above.

But what happens when the images we consume begin to reprogram our perceptual filters? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, argues that vision isn’t passive; it’s a co-creation between the body and the world. So what happens when AI-morphed faces start to seem more real than a natural one? When the airbrushed version of ourselves feels like the truer self?

It’s an aesthetic, yes, but it’s disturbing.

It’s a glitch in the way we process faces. This simulacrum - a copy with no original - has wedged itself between our eyes and our brains. Something about it feels less like beauty and more like a presence—something looming, watching, absorbing and reflecting our gaze in ways that feel unsettlingly off.

Think Slender Man, the Back Rooms — emergent haunted golems from the collective subconscious of the internet. The terror isn’t from violence, but indeterminacy: something close to human, but just... off. Watching, absorbing, reflecting our gaze in ways that feel unsettlingly wrong. And once that filter installs itself into our way of seeing, it’s not just the world we perceive differently—it’s ourselves.

It demands participation. It demands compliance.

Body Horror, the Female Gaze, and Remembering How to See

This is what makes Self-Portrait 52 so powerful: it short-circuits the hijacking. It forces you to stop, to actually look, to confront the quiet horror embedded in self-surveillance. The mirror, that trusted accomplice in our daily rituals, suddenly turns on us. The gaze—the one we’ve perfected in front of our iPhones, in front of ourselves—becomes alien.

The face in Wood’s portrait isn’t grotesque, but it isn’t perfect either. It exists in a limbo where recognition becomes unsettling. It captures something fundamentally female: the act of seeing oneself not as a subject, but as an object of scrutiny. This is where the female gaze—so often theorized in relation to male desire—turns inward, into something closer to body horror. The self becomes something to dissect, to critique, to perfect.

Jenny Saville, Propped, signed and titled on the stretcher, oil on canvas, 213.4 by 182.9 cm. 84 by 72 in., Executed in 1992., privately owned. (Fun fact: I worked on the sale of this piece while at Sotheby’s in 2018.)

Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992) does this with flesh—her monumental nude spills across the canvas, heavy, distorted, confronting the weight of societal judgment head-on. Wood, instead, does it through the subtleties of the everyday: the routine act of looking in a mirror and feeling that flicker of dissonance between the self and the image of the self.

Wood’s work resists the algorithmic flattening of selfhood. It reminds us that to be human is to exist in specificity, in the minor distortions that make us particular rather than optimized.

The strength of Self-Portrait 52 lies in its refusal to seduce. There’s something about its offhandedness—its casual alienation—that makes it feel both intimate and inaccessible. It is, in a way, an act of resistance—not just against beauty standards, but against the whole way we have been taught to see.

Critics have described Wood’s self-portraits as “perverted realism,” oscillating between reality and surreality. But they miss the banality of the absurd. It’s not perverted realism—it’s just reality, uncomfortably magnified. A female experience made monumental, inescapable. So you can’t dismiss the horror. Wood’s face peers back at you—the same way she peers at herself each day. Negotiating everything embedded in the horror of being perceived against a simulacrum.

To me, Propped is a much better example of perverted realism and distortion. Saville wields the grotesque to reject the male gaze’s demand for aesthetic palatability. Wood, however, captures a quieter, more insidious discomfort: the way we’ve internalized the obligation to surveil ourselves. That is a much slower-drip horror.

There is something distinctly contemporary about this sense of estrangement. The current relationship to the self—curated through screens, hyper-aware yet vaguely detached—feels embedded in Wood’s brushstrokes. We exist in a space where self-care is both urgent and futile, where looking at oneself too closely can feel like violence. Her work understands this tension and refuses to resolve it.

If you Sit for Long Enough, the Forest will Grow Over You

I just finished reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. You may ask - “but Georgia, what does a book about eco-terrorists in the 1980s have to do with body horror?” It comes down to one character, Mimi Ma.

Ma’s character, or Mulberry as she is otherwise known, spends much of her life moving through inherited expectations—first as the polished, hyper-competent daughter of a Chinese immigrant, then as a businesswoman, then as a fugitive from her own existence. She sheds identity after identity like bark peeling from a tree, until all that’s left is the simplest, most essential version of herself: a woman who sits in silence and stares.

I kinda love that Bill Gates also liked this book… Probably would have referenced it anyways, but the validation is nice.

By the time we meet her as a therapist, she has stripped the practice down to its bones. No talking, no interpretation, no performance of understanding. Just presence. She watches her patients, and in the space of that gaze, something begins to unravel. No guidance, no intervention—only the unbearable weight of being seen.

This is the tension in Self-Portrait 52. Wood’s painting doesn’t just depict a face; it enacts an encounter. The longer you look, the more it resists resolution. It does not give. It does not soothe. It simply holds. And if you sit with it long enough, something happens—not to the image, but to you.

There’s a reason people instinctively turn away from this kind of looking. To be seen like this—without softening, without mediation—is intolerable. So much of contemporary visual culture is about resolution: the perfectly color-graded self, the curated expression, the polished aesthetic that tells you exactly how to feel. But Wood, like Mimi Ma, denies the easy exit. There is no relief in interpretation, only endurance. The only way out is through.

And when you finally come out the other side—when you’ve let the discomfort do its slow, needling work—something releases. Maybe it’s catharsis. Maybe it’s transformation. Or maybe, as I found myself doing after staring at Self-Portrait 52 for so long my eyes started to water, maybe you just laugh. Because at some point, the horror of being perceived stops being horror at all. It just is.

The Art That Stared Back

Here’s the thing: meaning shifts depending on where you see something. If I had encountered Self-Portrait 52 framed in a gallery, surrounded by Wood’s more surrealist works, I might not have felt that gut-punch of recognition and have been sent spiraling. But on TikTok, in the same feed as beauty tutorials, aesthetic vlogs, and skincare influencers, it hit differently. It’s a disruption in the stream, a mirror held up at just the wrong angle.

I am, after all, a chronically online young woman, marinated in the cult of self-care (willingly, I might add). Does this mean I’m giving up Sunday night face masks or monthly facials? Absolutely not. That time is sacred. But I can approach it with a little more irreverence—the only way to kill a boggart, after all, is to laugh at it.

You will learn quickly that a lot of my references will ultimately boil down to Harry Potter.