The Scapegoat

In this drawing, the figure emerges like a wounded jester, bearing silent horns or a tattered cap – half clown, half creature of ancient ritual. They cradle fragments of faces, masks of selves that once sought protection or invisibility. Around them float many other visages: fragile, undefined, spectral. Each face carries a silent sorrow, the sorrow of being unseen, or seen only in the function of blame.

The scapegoat has always been a vessel for collective shadows. In archaic rites, the goat was sent into the desert bearing the sins of a community, sacrificed to purify others. But in this intimate drawing, scapegoating is not an external ritual but an internal fracture. The artist remembers herself as an adolescent – a time of relentless violence, when identity shattered into these many drifting masks, each holding pain but also a flicker of hidden truth.

Here, the scapegoat becomes an emblem of the soul’s resistance. She is condemned, yet she holds her faces with care. She keeps them close to her chest, protecting each mask, each lost possibility. The jester horns speak of survival through performance, irony, and art itself – of becoming the performer who distils her own exile into vision.

In this work, there is no redemption offered by others. Redemption comes only through the act of creation: the refusal to be erased, the quiet dignity of holding even the ugliest masks with compassion. It is a portrait of becoming one’s own witness, finding coherence through expression, even if that coherence remains fragmented and tentative.

This scapegoat does not depart into the desert to die for others. Instead, she remains, haunted but enduring, surrounded by her many selves – guardian of her own tender multiplicity.