In Self-portrait #1: Shedding, Vicky Smith appears in multiple superimposed layers on hand-processed black-and-white film. Framed as a white bust against a black background, her features are unsharp, surrounded by a pulsating echo of her silhouette — hovering around her and passing through her. As she rotates her head from side to side, accelerating and decelerating, her face is captured at every angle and her hair lifts and trails through the air, multiplying across exposures. Working with the Bolex camera, Smith uses superimposition and shifts in speed to build and then erode the image. Her bust suddenly falls backwards, slipping into focus and away from its layered doubles. It leaves behind a residual, spectral trace, as if the body sheds its own image, layer by layer. What remains is not disappearance, but clarity: a self arriving through subtraction, shaped by motion, gravity, and the mechanics of the camera.
