Veins of Porcelain: The Zippered Mind

Veins of Porcelain: The Zippered Mind reimagines Jackson Pollock’s  Number 28 as a surreal autopsy of identity—where thoughts become smoke, trauma is fossilized, and reality fractures under the weight of revelation. Pollock’s signature chaos is no longer confined to the flatness of the canvas; it is now the architecture of the psyche, unzipping at the center to reveal a storm of memory, contradiction, and truth disguised as masks. 

In this composition, the human face becomes terrain. A zipper splits the head down the center—not as violence, but as unveiling. From the crumbling, arid fissure of this mindscape emerges a golden mask stitched with newspaper clippings and headlines, a collage of societal narrative and performative identity. Eyes peer from behind it—not dead, but resigned. The face underneath, pale and subdued, floats in soft chiaroscuro, ghostlike and unknowable, gazing sideways into oblivion. What hides beneath the zipper is not just a mind, but a ruin: cracked earth, fragmented timelines, and birds that erupt like thoughts escaping repression. 

Pollock’s visual language spills through this cerebral terrain. His chaotic, looping strokes from  Number 28 , originally explosions of abstract urgency, are here reincarnated as psychological pressure—residual storms wrapped around the figures like electromagnetic scars. Lines swirl and stretch across the mask and background, subtly woven into hair, smoke, and flight paths. The abstraction is not decoration—it is neurology rendered in oil and dust. 

The color palette transitions across emotional zones. Earth tones dominate the cracked skull—dry browns, charred blacks, and faded ochres—signifying burnout, the cost of restraint, and the fossilized weight of old identities. The mask’s golden gleam is deceptive, suggesting both prestige and decay, its shine tempered by brittle texture and the haunting reality of paper and ink—newsprint crumbling under the weight of headlines we were never allowed to write ourselves. Deep blacks swarm in the form of birds—thousands of crows or ravens—symbolizing memory, mourning, and the cacophony of hidden voices. The pale blues and foggy greys in the background dissolve edges into atmosphere, suggesting the blur between self-perception and the roles we perform. 

As the artist, my thought while reimagining Pollock’s  Number 28 was centered around the notion of exposure. I asked what it would mean to unzip a person—not their body, but their narrative. Pollock’s original work captures the texture of thought in pure abstraction. I wanted to give that abstraction form—not by simplifying it, but by folding it into layers of personal and societal identity. What if the chaos on Pollock’s canvas is not random, but the pulse of everything we suppress—shame, brilliance, violence, and wonder? What if beneath every composed face, there’s a theater of ink and bone and fire? 

The figure’s duality is crucial. The visible face—the one outside the zipper—is smooth, unreadable, even serene. It is the face we show the world. But it is not the truth. The truth is beneath: a cracked, dry visage, half mask, half desert, fractured but still gleaming. The use of newspaper on the golden mask references how our identities are shaped by external stories, propaganda, image, and repetition. Our lives are coded in things others wrote about us—expectations, warnings, predictions. And yet, from within this cracked narrative, real eyes watch. 

The birds erupting from the mind’s top are not just symbolic—they are kinetic. They speak of urgency, escape, migration of soul. Some are dark memories, others are future thoughts trying to hatch. Their flight path is also a return to Pollock—his paint once flung in violent gestures is now transformed into flocks of unrest. 

In this reimagined world,  Number 28 is not just a painting—it is a cognitive storm. It is what happens when thought becomes visual. When emotion calcifies and language cracks under the pressure of time. It is the sound of a zipper opening—not to flesh, but to what we pretend to forget. 

Veins of Porcelain: The Zippered Mind is a painting about thresholds—the space between who we are and who we were told to be. It honors the chaotic honesty in Pollock’s abstraction while confronting the mythology of the composed self. It is uncomfortable by design. It makes the viewer choose: do you look at the mask, or do you peer beneath?