Inner/Outer Glow

Across different cultures and historical periods, the concept of the surface as a stage for transcendence has persisted. Ancient texts describe the effects of Yoga as manifesting in physical ways, such as skin health, voice, and odor. These diverse accounts allude to the idea that human surfaces, particularly the face, can serve as a canvas for the expression of transcendence.

In pre-modern times, jewellery and adornment could be seen as extensions of this expression, marking individuals with symbols of their inner and outer worlds. However, in the contemporary world, radiance and vitality are manufactured by a global beauty industry, dissociating these qualities from inner transformation. The skin, once a reflection of inner nature, now becomes a canvas for the reproduction of cosmetic effects, obscuring the true self beneath a facade of smoothness and luster. It is subjected to meticulous treatments that give it a translucent quality, seemingly revealing inner states, while actually generating the impression of such states.

The beauty industry complex sees the individuals across the world, all united in a precise choreography of morning and night skin routines, gua sha face sculpting motions, and GRWM’s. Over-lining their lips or swishing the flick of the eye liner in one endless motion of hands, mirrored through millions of screens, mirrors, between the walls and behind the doors. This ‘dance’ for wellbeing, while lit by phone screens and ring lights, is a ritual, perhaps not unlike those performed by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Amerindians, or Pacifica peoples – slathering oil, honey, flowers, crushed minerals and pearls – praying for fertility, youth and vitality to linger a little longer in the face of the imminent wintering of a human body, change of seasons, and generations.

Surface Latency by FELINA H.DB..

Surface Latency is a visual study of how different bodily materials perform growth and transformation across time. The project examines how elements such as hair, skin, nails, and teeth operate as expressive surfaces, reflecting and representing both inner and outer states of glow.

These bodily surfaces are not neutral. They shine, harden, peel, or break. Some express vitality through softness and translucency, others through sharpness, opacity, or resilience. This contrast between the visible and the latent, the polished and the raw, frames the core of the work; how materiality mediates identity, and how adornment can become a language of self-evolution and history representation.

Rigidity in moments of growth, fragility during exposure, or resistance in the face of change.

AI-generated imagery is used to extend the project’s exploration of surface and transformation. Just as the state of skin, hair, or nails reflects and conceals bodily processes, the digital surface mimics the physical world. This analogy produces a form of artificial glow, one that mirrors how beauty and identity are often simulated through products and routines rather than genuinely embodied. Within this framework, Surface Latency positions adornment as a site of tension between appearance and becoming.

This notion of ‘glow’ as something seemingly innate yet often generated is central to the project’s evolving direction. Radiance is explored not as a spontaneous quality, but as a surface effect engineered through layers of hydration, supplementation, and gloss. Moisture becomes both medium and metaphor, offering a synthetic vitality that blurs the line between wellness and performance. Here, bodily surfaces are not only expressive but curated, continuously negotiated between the organic and the artificial.

The work also isolates bodily materials, such as hair, and gradually extends to nails and teeth, as autonomous substances. Once detached from the body, these materials lose their symbolic intimacy and begin to occupy a more uncanny register. Their transformation into product-like or sculptural forms emphasises their dual nature; simultaneously familiar and estranged, aesthetic and objectified. This dislocation invites a broader reflection on the thresholds between care and control, vitality and excess.

Within this approach, the monstrous emerges, not as a rupture, but as a latent quality of beauty itself. Surface Latency dwells in the contradictions of products that promise radiance while concealing decay, revealing how beauty may function as both spectacle and mask. Visually, the work juxtaposes emotionally charged, cinematic imagery with editorial stillness, merging horror aesthetics with commercial codes. This interplay creates a friction that gestures toward deeper tensions within consumer culture, and the ways the body is rendered, fragmented, and reassembled in the service of desire.

By foregrounding close-ups, product arrangements, and speculative surfaces, the project continues to trace the ways in which adornment, decay, and transformation become entangled, offering a visual language for beauty that resists resolution and instead insists on complexity.