The process comes from my interest in the materiality of video. I print stills from my archive onto thin tissue paper, then build them up in layers of wax. The surface becomes translucent and skin-like: you can see through it, but never fully. The image is present, but softened, darkened and partly withheld. I was interested in using an ancient material process to hold a digital image. Encaustic wax has a long history in portraiture, especially in the Fayum mummy portraits, where wax was used to preserve the image of a person after death. In Looking Back, the wax does something similar and opposite at the same time: it protects the image, but also makes it harder to reach.

“The self-portrait is built up through layers of encaustic wax over inkjet prints on archival tissue paper. Filippova perches on a ledge that cuts straight through the pictorial frame, her face blurred and turned from the lens.”
Sofia Hallstrom