The moment I first saw Juno Calypso’s work, I was immediately drawn in—photography that captured female figures in grotesque make-up, wigs, and masks, posing within interiors drenched in pink hues, eerie and alienating. Juno’s is an imagery that feels both disquieting and laced with sharp humour—imagine Cindy Sherman stepping into a David Lynch film.

Juno emerged into the art world with her series Joyce—a collection of haunting self-portraits, centered on its enigmatic eponymous subject, a character teetering between comedy and a deep, aching sadness—selected images of which have appeared, among other places, at the Wellcome Collection’s recent exhibition The Cult of Beauty.

Video-calling her back home in London, Juno appeared in the Zoom tile—straight brown hair, a pink sweater, a softness to her demeanor, quiet and thoughtful. Yet as our conversation unfolded, she spoke with striking intensity, unraveling her conflicted relationship with her own face and body as subjects of her own art, along with the constant push and pull between objectification and viewership that her work dramatises and her determination to resist any clear-cut definition of the photographic gaze.

The contrast was unmistakable—an artist whose presence felt gentle, yet whose ideas carried the weight of something deeply profound, something she could spot only from the corner of her eye, like an uncanny reflection. This same tension runs through her work, as layers of artifice materialise and envelop the human experience at loci where beauty and distortion collide, blurring boundaries of definition and difference therein.

Maria

Let’s dive right in. I first came across your work about seven years ago on Instagram when you had just released The Honeymoon—a series of photos, including self-portraits, shot inside a love hotel in Pennsylvania. They immediately stood out to me, particularly because I felt that the subject of your work overlapped with my own research interests—the uncanny, unsettling, and yet, humorous aesthetics of representing a highly stylised, constructed femininity. Would you say that’s an accurate description?

Juno

Oh, yes.

Maria

Then, last summer, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw that you were posting stories from Malta. I reached out, and you told me you’re of Maltese heritage. It was such a lovely moment, realising we share that connection. I’m really happy we get to have this conversation now—it feels a bit fated.

Juno

Yes, I agree!

Maria

I’d love to speak to you about your relationship with faces—especially your own—since your engagement with self-portraiture is quite complex. The term “self-portraiture” itself feels contested in your work, given that you typically photograph yourself as a fictional character named Joyce. I’m curious about how you relate to your own face through photography and, by extension, how that relationship intersects with the faces of others, especially Joyce’s, in your work.

Juno

I have a very conflicted relationship with my face, which is why in some images I show myself, and in others, I don’t. There’s never a consistent love for it—sometimes, even something as simple as joining a Zoom call feels disorienting—it feels like I can never really present my real face. There’s always something that’s been flipped or mirrored and it always takes me by surprise. I might feel confident, but then I see a reflection that doesn’t align with that feeling. My face betrays me at certain points, making me seem sad or upset when I’m not. I don’t always feel in control of it. With Joyce, I think I was trying to let go of that control, to release something through humour—exaggerating the sadness by leaning into it, wearing fake teeth, heavy makeup, a wig, and embracing the face I often resisted.

Maria

Would you consider that a shedding, as it were, of your own face? Were you, the artist, becoming faceless in order to make way for Joyce?

Juno

Yes, because it wasn’t me anymore. I was acting a role, and to do that, you have to let go of your ego, stop being self-conscious, and not take it personally. That felt freeing—like I was no longer weighed down by taking myself too seriously. But, then again, it never ends there. That was a year when I felt good, and then, the following year, I was covering my face again in my work. There’s never a moment of That’s it, I’m free. You have to shed again and again. And then there’s aging—now I’m 35, and new problems are emerging. It’s a never-ending relationship.

Maria

Your series around Joyce is rich with irony, melodrama, and heightened emotion. Do you think those elements add or remove layers to your own face as the subject of the photos? What about Joyce’s face in, for instance, Artificial Sweetener—are aspects of her face being erased or built on, or maybe both?

Juno

There’s a duality in this image. While I exaggerate features like a clown, the makeup itself remains within the realm of what many women typically wear—false lashes, nothing extreme. The significance lies not just in the act of dressing up but in the fact that the image has been taken and shared. Most women wouldn’t want such a photo made public, despite their effort to look polished, because it exposes disappointment or deadness—a sort of depression. If you got that dressed up, you’d want to share an image that makes people envy you and be in awe of you and think, Oh, she’s so beautiful! I wish I could look like that! But this doesn’t. It resonates on a more personal level, once the viewer understands the ambivalence that is there.

Maria

The word deadness is striking because it suggests the void behind the construction of this type of femininity and the related process of shedding one face and creating another. What does the face, more generally, mean to you in photography? I ask this while also thinking about how your self-portraits exist alongside your commercial work where you’ve photographed figures like Marina Abramović, Billie Eilish, Katy Perry,  Naomi Campbell—all of whom have important, recognisable faces. What is at stake when you decide to compromise or outrightly relinquish your own face in your personal work?

Juno

For me, there wasn’t much conversation around the face. I did my research and found writing that backed up my feelings, but it always seemed like the body dominated discussions about women’s self-esteem and image. It felt strange to separate the two, as if I were being split in half. The face carried so much unspoken importance—something rarely acknowledged. We have words like ugly, but that term is mostly used for faces, not bodies. The face has been described as a passport through life, an identity card, like fingerprints. That idea unsettled me. It felt exposing—your face is always on display, revealing emotions you can’t always control. People see things in your face that you might not see yourself, which made me feel vulnerable. It’s almost like genitalia—everyone has a unique face, but unlike the private nature of the body, it’s always on show. I was also interested in pretty privilege—how even unconventional bodies in modelling are often paired with conventionally attractive faces.We can cover our bodies freely, but covering the face provokes strong reactions. The burqa, for example, or even the current UK discussions about banning balaclavas—there’s a deep societal resistance to obscuring the face. It’s seen as antisocial, as a refusal of identity.

Maria

Your photography delves into the strong aesthetic implications of what you just described, especially in how you latch onto specific visual cues related to social norms and rules. The way you treat the face in this regard is particularly fascinating. I’ve been reflecting on your work, and it seems to invite exploration in several distinct ways, especially through the lens of presence and absence, identity and anonymity, visibility and invisibility. I’d love to discuss this further in relation to a selection of individual images from your work. For example, 12 Reasons You’re Tired All The Time from your Joyce series—it was shot in Malta, right? I can tell by the pattern in the floor tiles.

Juno

Yes, that’s in Sliema!

Maria

In this piece, your treatment of the face involves a technique where you cover the face with a mask or some sort of artificial counterpart—in the case of 12 Reasons, a skincare mask. This specific image has sparked a lot of discussion in the discourse surrounding your work, and rightly so—the visual cues you’ve created here are so rich and layered. Keeping 12 Reasons in mind for comparative purposes, I would like to shift the attention to a more recent work of yours titled Jowls where the human face isn’t just covered, but entirely replaced by an alien face.

Juno

I wanted to exaggerate that sense of dysmorphia—the tricks our minds play on us. In 12 Reasons, the face is hidden, and we don’t know what’s underneath—it’s just the perfect, plastic mask. With Jowls, I wanted to strip away the mask and even what’s objectively real to show that hallucination we sometimes see in our own minds. It’s like when a friend looks at a photo of themselves and sees something horrifying, something monstrous, no matter how much you reassure them.

Maria

The humour is always there, though, right? The ever present reckoning with tragedy through comedy, the camp, the irony, and the melodrama. In this sense, the playful interaction with facelessness is especially powerful. In these moments, you go beyond just masking or veiling, blurring the boundaries between the face and the surrounding environment. There’s something especially enigmatic in this type of engagement with the face, like the side profiles Silhouette or The Salon. In these moments the face feels almost absent, even though it’s still there. Then there’s the half-submerged face in water in Sensory Deprivation, faces obscured by wigs in Sedative Pink, Reconstituted Meat Slices and Chicken Dogs, and a face hidden by food in Breakfast—each of these creates its own tension between presence and absence, making the face both visible and withdrawn in such intriguing ways.

Juno

I like this connection you’ve made—it’s really making me think. I think it’s about features, you know? Here, I’m doing the opposite of what Guy Bourdin did when photographing legs and a torso. That kind of fragmentation definitely ties into the history of violence against women’s bodies—the way the dead woman’s body is so often depicted. It’s dehumanising. I mean, we could go into that, but with the images you mentioned, I don’t want the body to feel inanimate. I want the audience to see that there is a person, that there is a face—that they are alive, even if that presence is somewhat obscured. I guess what I’m really doing is obscuring features. And features, or rather the harmony of features, is what stresses most people out about their own faces. We separate and categorise—we divide the body the way we’ve divided countries, in ways that were never meant to be divided. Even the concept of my features is strange—what does that even mean? My features?

Maria

And the terminology that crops up around all that—it’s wild. Do you have doe eyes or siren eyes? All these labels, all these categories. I’m on TikTok a lot, and it’s just fascinating. The linguistics, the discourse around it—it’s like this endless, multiplying thing. Like the Hydra in Greek mythology—you cut off one head, and two more appear. Do you have cortisol face? Do you have… whatever the latest thing is? It just keeps going. It’s relentless.

Juno

Outrageous, yes.

Maria

Bringing it back to your work, it’s interesting that you’re not just playing with the face as a whole, but there’s also this kind of micromanagement of it. The face is still there, but facelessness is achieved through the erasure of smaller features as we deem them human. And I guess that comes through in Jowls as well, where the features aren’t just obscured but exaggerated to the point of distortion.

Juno

It’s fiction, and it’s reality. I’ve created a work of fiction because, for instance, when looking at Reconstituted Meat Slices or Chicken Dogs, we might imagine, Who is this woman? Why is she dead? What’s going on? Why can’t we see her face? That mystery creates curiosity. But for me, it’s also about protection. Because in between taking these pictures, there are versions where my features are fully visible. And I guess I’m hiding the power of those features, because when I see the ones where my face is clear, it’s overwhelming—it explodes with emotion. Suddenly, I fixate on my mouth, my nose, every little thing. The harmony of those features tells a story that’s too much to process all at once. I’d rather not start thinking, Oh, I wish this looked different, or Why does that look like that? They say your face tells a story, and sometimes I don’t like the story mine tells. It always looks a bit sad, or feeble, or scared—it never looks powerful enough.

Maria

So you’d rather shift the focus to canned food, for instance. I love that—how the inanimate becomes animated. And how, at the same time, the animate might feel just as still, just as dead in a way. There’s this strange interplay between life and lifelessness in your work, where objects can hold presence and power, while the human form is sometimes obscured, withdrawn, or even erased. And facelessness plays into this too—it’s not just about hiding identity but about redirecting attention, shifting the emotional weight onto something else. The absence of a face creates a different kind of presence, one that invites projection and interpretation in a way a fully visible face might not.

Juno

Or maybe it’s an appreciation. I think that people who are so upset and dissatisfied with their looks are often the ones who appreciate beauty the most. Even something as simple as a tin of food—I can fall in love with it. I go to a supermarket, and I think, God, I can’t believe how beautiful that object is. The graphic design, the story it tells, the colours, the typography—it’s all so carefully constructed. And the food itself—what a beautiful, curious object. And then comes the thought: Why can’t I be a beautiful object? But then you open the can, and it stinks. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s how people feel too.

Maria

I get the same sense of translation—a transfer of aesthetics of this artificial style that’s happening between woman and object. There’s this overlap, where the beauty of an object, its careful design, its curated perfection, starts to feel like an ideal we measure ourselves against. The same way a can of food is dressed up with colour, typography, and branding, there’s a parallel to the way beauty is constructed and performed. It’s like an aesthetic language that moves between things and people, blending artifice with identity.

Juno

Yes, I’ve definitely spoken about this before—how I chose these objects without really thinking why. I just loved the packaging. And then people started making comparisons with artificiality, with plastic surgery, fake tan—all these ways we add artificial elements to an organic form. Processed food, processed bodies. And how certain things get labeled as bad taste, bad food, junk food. And maybe, by that logic, these become junk women because they have plastic in their faces.

Maria

Back to the face—there are moments in your work where the focus shifts to body parts other than the face. Earlier in this conversation, you also referenced Guy Bourdin’s approach to photographing torsos and limbs and, when you do it yourself, there’s a distinct way you frame these body parts. You present a torso in Slouch, hands in If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? and Seaweed Wrap, legs in Sedative Pink, A Cure For Death and Die Now, Pay Later, and feet in The Salon. The way you compose these elements creates facelessness, but it still remains deeply personal. How do you achieve that balance?

Juno

This is interesting because the hand —it feels defiant. It reminds me of the end of Carrie, when her hand bursts out of the grave. It’s a motif, definitely. The hand can feel almost claw-like, very witchy. But with the other body parts, I’m more consciously playing with clichés of photographing women—but from a feminine gaze. Even self-portraiture is scrutinised, like, “She’s objectifying herself!”. It’s well-meaning but, personally, I find it irritating. It reinforces the same misogynistic concept it aims to dismantle. 

Maria

It seems that what you’re investigating is closely tied to style. Typically, the phrase style over substance has a negative connotation, but in your case, I feel it encapsulates the entire thesis of your work. Your exploration primarily relates to the aesthetic. So, whether you’re reworking the gaze—be it the male gaze, female gaze, or objectification—it seems what you’re offering is more of a rendition of those elements.

Juno

Exactly. Thank you! I appreciate that. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I want to emphasise that I’m not rejecting perfection, or feminine aesthetics; I’m actually embracing them. I think I prefer a subtle approach, and I’m glad that it comes across.

Maria

Additionally, you’re choosing to engage in photography which is a lens-based medium that carries implications around vis à vis the gaze in itself. The process becomes complicated in terms of where we’re looking and how we interpret what we see.

Juno

Totally. Yes, the camera and the female body—there’s a whole history of its own. We all have our own interpretations even before I open my mouth and describe what I’ve done and what my purpose was. So, I think I’m interested in those things—what people assume.

Maria

You’re interested in investigating assumptions just because they’re there, without necessarily wanting to change anything about them.

Juno

Just to provoke. I’m not a political figure. I’m not trying to push a manifesto. But I enjoy the conversation it creates.

Maria

In your work there’s also facelessness as a result of the total absence of the body. Sometimes the body is absent altogether, resulting in ghostly figures, such as in Phantasma. At other times the photographs the human is missing completely such as in Tuesday In Eternity and Twenty-Six Feet Below Ground.

Juno

The reality is, it’s a relief for me not to have to be in the picture. I’m really happy to not be in a photo.  I have to remind myself that an audience can still enjoy a photograph without a person in it. In fact they might enjoy it more. 

Maria

The face is almost being replaced in Twenty-Six Feet Below Ground by this gaping hole—a void—and in Tuesday in Eternity, by the window. I was reading about the setting for What to Do With a Million Years, which these two photos are part of, and the background story is incredible—a subterranean house built in the 1970s by Jerry Henderson, CEO of Avon Cosmetics, in Las Vegas, designed to protect him and his wife from nuclear war, with windows looking out onto an artificial garden.

Juno

The entrance to the underground dwelling is sort of the mouth to hell, and the sink as well. The way the sink makes that gurgling noise—it’s quite disgusting. I guess the sink is like the mouth of the house. Even taps—they’re like two eyes and a nose. 

Maria

The Fantasy Suite as well from The Honeymoon set is also void of human presence. At the same time, with all those mirrors, it invites new faces to emerge. There’s a multiplicity there—reflections creating versions of versions, a space that isn’t just vacant but full of potential personas

Juno

Documenting it felt like capturing a strange dream. For me, it was a deeply surreal encounter with the space I can convey everything except the smell and the sound.

Maria

Interesting that you mention dreams and the surreal. The saturation in your photographs enhances that quality. How do colour and intensity contribute to this sensory experience when the human face is absent?

Juno

I strive for harmony in colour and perspective, everything considered and precise—like styling hair or makeup to perfection. And like a dream, where everything is vivid. I associate vividness with colour, so my work has a sharp, hyperreal texture.

Maria

Bringing it all back to this publication’s preoccupation with identity loss and the void intersecting with facelessness—do you see your experimental engagement with the human face in your work as favouring a blank slate for new identities to emerge, or does it emphasise erasure? Maybe both? Compromising the visuals around faces could offer reinvention, but it might also deepen absence, making it clear there’s nothing to hold onto. Does it create freedom, or does it amplify loss?

Juno

It highlights the confusion, the delusion of it all—we’ll never truly know what we look like or who we are. Maybe we never will. We spend our lives glancing in mirrors, looking at photos, searching for certainty, but it’s always out of reach, always beyond our control. These images might be an attempt to enjoy that uncertainty—or to freeze it, to make it tangible for a moment. And yet, in all the pictures she appears in, Joyce is giving up. She’s exhausted—Oh God, it’s not working. She’s tried every pose, every version of herself, but the relentless pursuit of perfection is consuming. How much is lost in that chase? How much do we miss by being trapped in it? Lately, I’ve found myself drawn more to politics and history, and it’s almost relaxing because I don’t have to think about myself at all.

Maria

I’ve never felt more selfless—or perhaps faceless—than when I’m deep in research. There’s something about becoming absorbed in something outside of yourself that makes you forget your own existence for a while.

Juno

Yeah, you’re like, I don’t care what I look like. Look at all this. You realize how finite life is. All this history happened, and all these people are gone now. It’s refreshing to zoom out. But I think, for me, the cure—the antidote—is the animation of the face. When you animate your face, you’re injecting your face with personality—you can almost become anyone and tell a story more impressive and harmonious than any ‘facial feature’. It’s magical.

@junocalypso