Monika Zawadzki’s two-part sculptural self-portrait consists of fully formed fragments of a hand: a thumb and a severed fingertip. Their enlargement gives the sculpture a monumental, almost statuesque character. The thumb juxtaposed with the fingertip — a ‘small slice of a sphere’, as Zawadzki calls it — belongs to a larger series of works dedicated to ‘the awareness of one’s own flesh’. In these works, the sculptor examines the identity of the body, understood both as mass, flesh or pulp, in open and closed arrangements, in relation to the maintenance of the organism’s integrity or lack thereof. In Self-portrait 1, 2 (Diptych) she raises the questions of whether and how bodily fragments represent being. Do they retain the identity of their owner-creator after dismemberment, or do they become emancipated? Why does one’s own body become the inspiration and material for the creation of art? And finally, what role does pain play in all this?