Making Faces
This series is a collaborative portrait project between artists and me, in which I make a photographic portrait of each artist, and one based on the conversation I had with the artist, and in return each artist creates a portrait of me in their own medium of choice. My primary medium for expression is photography, however throughout my life I have always enjoyed being creative and experimenting with multiple mediums and materials. It was this interest that influenced the inspiration and catalyst for this project, which aims to explore and examine how a variety of visual artists use different mediums to create representations. In order to explore this topic I engaged in a conversation with each artist to uncover their inspirations, influences and personalities that have shaped their creative processes and to understand how these factors have a bearing on the types of representations they make.
The objective of this project is to investigate and highlight how meaning is constructed through visual representation, this series intends to achieve this through the process of making the creators of such representations both active and passive in the process of collaboration with in the context of this project. This objective is achieved by me being active in the creation of a portrait of each artist and also being passive as a subject of the portraits created by the artists, this relation between being active and passive also will occur with the artists taking part in the project.
In order to compound this effect of activity and passivity of artist and subject, the resulting images are displayed as triptychs. This approach is designed to create a correlation between the portraits, in order to highlight how each artist, including myself, creates meaning through visual representations of others, how different mediums, influences, inspirations and creative processes can impact on how meaning is created and interpreted in visual representations of others.