This eery and sexually ambiguous self-portrait is typical of Thorneycroft’s most celerbated works in its use of flickering self-illumunation through long exposure photography and the use of props: in this case, an F-18 fighter pilot mask with primitivistic appendages of wire and bone including a deer hoof. The artist’s face is obscured, and she takes on a striding, warrior-like pose. In its collision of references to the contmporary military and primitive ritual, infused with secually due to the subject’s nudity, the image is an icon of agression, all sublimated, made seductive, in its wash of modulated chiaroscuro.
Such images have personal significance for the artist in that both her father and brother are fighter pilots with the Canadian armed forces.