Tendered Self is an upper-body bust of a woman whose head is replaced by a cash register, compressing identity into a single apparatus of exchange. The truncation of the figure intensifies the metaphor: the work does not depict a full body moving through the world, but a torso presented as specimen, as product, as display. Where a face would normally offer interiority and recognition, the sculpture installs a machine built to total, receipt, and record, turning personhood into transaction.

The title sharpens the critique. “Tendered” suggests both payment and the act of offering, implicating the ways the self can be submitted to evaluation, priced, and approved. With the register occupying the site of thought and speech, the bust proposes that subjectivity is being formatted by commerce, that value becomes the primary language available for self-definition. The register reads as a surrogate mind, reducing complexity to categories and numbers, and positioning the viewer as consumer and assessor.

Tendered Self functions as a portrait of commodified femininity and the psychological costs of living under constant appraisal. It asks what remains tender, private, or intact when the mechanisms of purchase and judgment replace the very features through which we understand a person.