Having as its theme the existing relation among Declan Kiberd's notion of "self-invention", Irish novelist James Joyce's work, and the Modernist context, the article's main objective is to critically analyse the essay Portrait of the Artist, written by Joyce in 1904. In order to do so, the article discusses the concept of 'self-invention', the main features of Portrait of the Artist, as well as the imbrication between the experimental precepts and practices that mark Modernism and the Irish colonial context. The ideas of Terry Eagleton, Richard Ellmann, James Fairhall, Declan Kiberd, along with Joyce's were articulated as the theoretical assumptions of the article. One of the results of the investigation carried out throughout the article is to make explicit how the Irish colonial context in which the writing of Portrait of the Artist took place made a fundamental contribution to the experimental quality of the ' selfinvention' project that would end up constituting a significant portion of Joyce's body of work.