A KOPTIC WOMAN

Ongoing Series

After the British Library, 1897.

This series begins not with a live subject, but with a ghost.

In 1897, an engraving appeared on page 132 of The Land of the Pharaohs – a portrait simply labelled "A Koptic Woman." She is unnamed, her history compressed into a single caption, her likeness reproduced for a Victorian audience hungry for Orientalist romance.

Decades later, the British Library digitised the image and released it into the public domain. I found her there: silent, patient, waiting to be seen again.

I decided to reimagine her – not as a historical relic, but as a living presence. Across watercolour, ink, collage, and digital manipulation, I re-sampled the original engraving again and again. Each iteration asks a different question: What happens to identity when it is copied? When an anonymous woman is refracted through multiple mediums, does she multiply – or dissolve?

This series is an act of creative archaeology. It exhumes a forgotten image and grants it new surfaces, new textures, new ambiguities. The Koptic Woman remains unknown. But in these works, she is no longer silent.