Maria Kopshina
Self-Portrait with a Closed Curtain
Class of: 2029
Major: Strategic Design and Management BBA
Medium: Poetry / written text
Faculty: Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman
Prompt: This assignment asked students to create a self-portrait using language rather than image. Through poetry, we were encouraged to reflect on memory, identity, and lived experience, and to consider how personal history, emotion, and voice can function as material. The project focused on translating internal states into a written form that could communicate presence, absence, and selfhood.
This project is a poetic self-portrait that explores memory as a central structure of identity. Rather than describing physical appearance, the work focuses on emotional inheritance, personal history, and quiet moments that shaped who I am. The poem reflects on relationships, loss, and tenderness as ways of understanding the self. By using language as a visual and emotional space, the project positions memory not as something static, but as something alive, fragile, and constantly unfolding.