Defaced: A Series of Headaches
Six years. Six journals. Twenty portraits.
A Series of Headaches is a physical representation of various migraines and tension headaches, adapted and illustrated as twenty self portraits by Defaced. The series draws from a headache journal he kept between January 2021 and April 2026, documenting the date, place, and medication consumed, with some entries accompanied by a few scrawled words. After years of inconclusive doctor’s visits, he reverted to self medication, and the journal ultimately became the source material for the collection.
Twenty entries were selected either because the artist still remembered them vividly or because they read back as strangely humorous. Some descriptions are mundane (“bath doesn’t help,” Hong Kong, 23/3/26), while others drift closer to the language of dreams (“pecking my brain,” Miami, 1/12/22; “brain bulging out of my head,” New York, 27/2/26; “feel like a tree,” Malta, 13/11/25).
Drawing inspiration from Hubert Airy’s migraine aura drawings and the surreal logic of LSD: Dream Emulator, the series marked a major shift in Defaced’s visual language. Moving away from his usual style, he embraced the aesthetics of old Nintendo and PS2 era games, returning to the imagery of childhood, including action figures, avatars, and video games, as a way of moving forward.
Each self portrait is constructed from fragments tied to a specific entry, including hairstyle, medication, location, and emotional state. Rather than functioning as literal depictions, the figures operate as transformed extensions of the artist himself, attempting to give visible form to invisible experiences such as pain, emotion, and psychological pressure.
Defaced is an artist living and working in Norwich, UK. He has built a body of work that began in illustration and has expanded across self-portraits, character collections, puppetry and live performance. He started in graphic design out of high school before moving into freelance illustration, with commissions for Apple and a range of startups, and entered web3 in late 2020.
Defaced’s work is known for surreal worldbuilding, cartoonish characters carrying contemplative human emotion. The humour is cynical, and the work returns repeatedly to the question of what it feels like to be the person making it.
Notable projects and exhibitions include Defaced N Friends (2021), Gotta Get Gurt (2023), Lost in the Supermarket (2023), The Dreams of the Fisherman (2023), You Could Suffer in Heaven (2024). He has shown physically at Sotheby's, Christie's and Asprey Studio.
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