Nude Yoga Girl: The “Persona” Sculptures

When a Body Becomes a Figure

For nearly a decade, Nude Yoga Girl (NYG) has worked at the intersection of photography, performance, and embodiment—using her own body to question the boundaries of nudity, self-image, and self-acceptance. Her self-portraits, composed through the discipline of yoga and the sensitivity of natural light, have formed a visual language that is instantly recognizable yet always in flux: anonymous but intimate, serene yet powerful, minimal yet emotionally charged.

The release of two bronze sculptures—Persona I and Persona II—marks the most significant expansion of her practice to date. Together, they introduce a sculptural series that translates NYG’s photographic vocabulary into three-dimensional form, deepening her exploration of the body while granting it a new permanence.

If her photographs meditate on breath, balance, and ephemerality, these sculptures anchor that meditation in bronze—a medium historically associated with endurance, monumentality, and the shaping of collective memory. In doing so, NYG enters an art-historical lineage shared by artists who shifted across mediums to articulate the body in new ways: Degas, Rodin, Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, and others who understood that form changes when material changes.

The “Persona” series emerges from this continuum, yet remains unmistakably her own: a sculptor shaping not just a figure, but her figure—her exact proportions, her poses, her gestures—translated with absolute fidelity and total vulnerability.

The Origin of a Series

From self-portrait to sculpted self

Before touching clay or bronze, NYG begins—as always—with photography.
For each sculpture, she photographs herself in 10 different angles, rotating slowly on a pedestal. These images become the blueprint through which she measures, maps, and reconstructs her form in clay.

“Each sculpture is made with my exact body measurements,” she explains.
“Everything starts from photography, but becomes something else once I sculpt. It’s literally me—just a smaller version.”

From there, the sculptural process becomes a practice of devotion and discipline. NYG spends one full month sculpting each figure, working almost every day to refine anatomy, proportion, gesture, and surface. The month-long process ensures that each work moves through stages of rough form, anatomical correction, emotional calibration, and surface refinement before it ever leaves her hands for bronze casting.

This is not casual experimentation.
It is sustained, patient, intimately physical work.

Over six months of private sculpting lessons—two to three sessions each week—NYG immersed herself in the centuries-old techniques of bronze casting: armature building, clay modeling, mold-making, and patination. The result is a sculptural series born from the same disciplined self-study that defined her photographs, yet transformed through weight, texture, and permanence.

Persona I (Edition of 5): Stillness in the Open

If the “Persona” series introduces a language, Persona I is its opening sentence.

A standing figure, upright and quiet, one arm crossed softly across the chest while the other rests at her side. The pose is delicate without being fragile, introspective without collapsing inward. Unlike many of NYG’s iconic photographic poses—often balanced on inversions or entwined limbs—Persona I stands firmly on the ground.

This groundedness is new.
It is contemplative, almost classical.

And because NYG spends one month sculpting each piece, the figure carries a slow, meditative quality. The surfaces retain subtle marks of the artist’s hand—tiny ridges, softened transitions—evidence of a daily, embodied engagement with the form.

A portrait without a face

Because NYG has always been anonymous, none of her sculptural figures have faces. They do not invoke likeness; instead, they invoke presence.
In Persona I, anonymity becomes universality. The figure is not “a portrait of NYG” but “a portrait of being.”

This mirrors the logic of her photography:
remove the identifying markers and the body becomes an archetype—human, unguarded, unclaimed.

The art-historical resonance

In art history, the standing nude appears in civilizations from ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance. Yet those bodies were idealized, perfected, mythologized.
NYG’s Persona I rejects idealization and instead presents authenticity, sculpted from—rather than imposed upon—the real.

The result is a figure that is both self-portrait and counter-portrait.
The artist offers her body not as spectacle, but as form—and through bronze, a form that endures.

Persona II (Unique 1/1): Equilibrium in Suspension

Where Persona I stands, Persona II ascends—literally and conceptually.
This sculpture is based on one of NYG’s most recognizable photographic works:

The iconic inverted pose—legs interwoven, hips elevated, weight balanced on the forearms—becomes a vortex of tension and harmony. In the photograph, the pose reads as breath and light. In bronze, it becomes structure, architecture, monument.

Bronze as transformation

Bronze fundamentally changes the gesture.
What once lasted a shutter’s click now exists as a permanent object with mass, patina, and shadow.
This shift evokes Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which transformed a fleeting motion into sculptural permanence. Yet NYG inverts that tradition: where Degas sculpted the dancer, NYG sculpts herself.

This autonomy separates her from the historical gaze that dominated representations of the female nude.
She is not muse, but author.
Not subject, but sculptor.

The paradox of inversion

In yoga, inversion represents clarity, perspective, the turning of one’s world upside-down to see it more truthfully.
In sculpture, inversion disrupts expectation. The viewer is drawn into the geometry of limbs, the hollow of the abdomen, the meeting of balance and vulnerability.

The fact that NYG spends an entire month sculpting each pose deepens this paradox: a gesture created in a moment requires thirty days of sustained, intimate attention to transform into bronze. What is immediate becomes slowly, meticulously eternalized.

As a unique 1/1 work, Persona II stands as the culminating gesture of this first sculptural chapter—its most intimate, complex, and emotionally charged piece.

The Body as Medium, Sculpture as Memory

Why sculpture? Why now?

NYG’s photographs have long explored the tension between intimacy and distance.
They reveal and conceal.
They subvert censorship through form rather than confrontation.
They use the body as language rather than commodity.

Sculpture intensifies all of these themes.

• Permanence: The fleeting gesture gains a future.
• Weight: The ethereal becomes physical.
• Touch: What was once mediated by camera becomes crafted by hand.
• Presence: The body is no longer an image — it is an object in space.

Because she sculpts each figure over an entire month, the work absorbs a rhythm absent in instantaneous photography. It becomes a record not just of a pose, but of time—time spent observing, touching, correcting, embodying.

A feminist re-claiming

Throughout art history, the female nude has been shaped, sculpted, and consumed almost exclusively through male authorship.
NYG reverses that power dynamic:
she sculpts the body that is hers, from the body that is hers.

This is more than self-portraiture.
It is a reclamation of authorship, a declaration that vulnerability can coexist with strength, and that the female form can speak without being spoken for.

Toward “Persona III” and Beyond

The “Persona” series is not finished.
It is a beginning—a sculptural architecture for a future body of work.

What “Persona” means in this context:

• A self-image, but not self-identity.
• A gesture that reveals interiority.
• A version of the self made durable.
• A physical record of an artist’s discipline and devotion.

The title also acknowledges that personas shift. NYG reveals not a face, but a form—one shaped carefully over one month per sculpture, merging her physical discipline with the discipline of artistic labor.

Conclusion: The Weight of Becoming

With Persona I and Persona II, Nude Yoga Girl has entered new territory—one that honors the past decade of her photographic practice while pushing decisively into a material future.

She is still the artist who builds poetry from breath, balance, and the quiet defiance of nudity.
But she is also now a sculptor, shaping permanence from impermanence, and discovering what happens when a body becomes a relic—not of the past, but of the self.

The “Persona” series stands as a declaration of transformation:
a body studied, understood, sculpted, and remembered.

A body in balance.
A body in bronze.
A body becoming.