Burlap sacked

I believe I am a collection of bad habits stuffed into a sewn-up sack.

Molded into the form of a girl, I drop dust mites as I walk. Run your hand over my face, and you will feel rough burlap and frayed strings masquerade as my skin.

Many nights, I forget to uncover my face. I let concealer and foundation and inky eyeliner seep into my pores and conceal the texture of the human face. I allow the mascara I hastily brush on in the morning to clump my eyelashes together during the night so that I have to rip my eyelids apart the next morning.

My skin itself feels heavy.

Concealer crusts at the creases along my eyes, at the hood most of all. I can feel the deltas of indents on my lips as they go another night smeared with lipstick. The products no longer sit on my skin. They have melded to my face, digging in claws of performative beauty like a parasite.

Inevitably, I will drag a cotton pad soaked with makeup remover over my nose over my lips and over my eyes. My second skin will peel away and leave me to gaze into the mirror where someone I might have known gazes back. I will grip the edges of the sink and feel the film over my eyes dry as they go unblinking. I won’t cry but I will wish I would.

Fragments — Kerry Sullivan ‘23

This work is meant to show a fragmented sense of self following a life-altering event. It is a depiction of how this event can linger in a person's mind until it is all they think about, making them feel scattered or distant from the people around them. It is a very personal experience and not one that I expect every viewer to understand, but I believe work like this helps those who do to feel less isolated.

BERNADETTE LEHEL ‘26

I wanted to convey a new feeling of complete detachment from myself with this piece. The journey of finding who I am as a person has been agonizingly long, and I have lost the purpose of it many times. I narrowed down that experience to one prime example: makeup. This is my first time putting into words how alien I've become to myself as I use more and more beauty products.