Facial Recognition
A collaboration with Hana Kark Collective
How do we see ourselves, and what happens when someone else takes our image and makes it their own? Eight artists (S. Portico Bowman, Carlyn Clark, Johnny Fox, Margaret Lazzari, Luke Reichle, Chris Russell, Caryl St. Ama and Nancy Kay Turner) each made a self-portrait and emailed it to the others. Everyone printed all eight portraits and worked on them separately in their own studios, cutting, pasting, tearing and layering their own aesthetics and media over the original artist's choices. Each image was deconstructed and reconstructed, giving it a different reality. The result is eight groups of eight 12 x 12 inch mixed media works, plus the original images.
My eight pieces are encaustic on cloth with stitching. I printed each artist's self-portrait on cloth, painted into it with encaustic, and then stitched across the surface. Every portrait asked for a different kind of thread: crossing lines, radiating suns, a knotted net, small stitched glyphs, ripples of running stitch, seams between bands of color. The last piece is my own self-portrait, which turned out to be the one face in the series you can't recognize by its features.
The project holds much of what runs through my practice: community and collaboration, zero waste, upcycled materials, using what you have, and memory. It was also made under a rule I had first tried quietly on an earlier series: no new materials. It worked so well that in January 2020 I made it a public commitment, one year at first and now nearly seven.
Portrait of/by/with Chris Russell. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. The black lines are Chris's own drawing. I love his sketches of people on the subway and streets of New York, and I imagined him riding through all that bustle. Here, perhaps, he's in a quiet moment in bed, with the chaos of the city stitched around the edges and kept at bay.
Portrait of/by/with Caryl St. Ama. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. She has stars in her eyes, stitched in blue thread. Around her, a turquoise field of dark-ringed lilac ovals, each circled by a dashed white line of stitches.
Portrait of/by/with Johnny Fox. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. I printed Johnny's portrait on cloth, set it in a streaked rust-orange field of encaustic, and sent rings of running stitch rippling out from the figure.
Portrait of/by/with Luke Reichle. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. I printed Luke's painted portrait on cloth and set it against a red field of encaustic scattered with small yellow squares, each stitched in dark red thread with its own mark, inspired by runes and hidden languages.
Portrait of/by/with Margaret Lazzari. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. Margaret's original was a black-and-white photograph; I printed it on cloth and brought it into color with encaustic and thread.
Portrait of/by/with Nancy Kay Turner. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. Nancy is a collagist, and everything here except the red ground comes from her collage, printed on cloth. My knotted yellow stitching is reminiscent of netting, implying capture or containment, though of what, I can't say.
Portrait of/by/with S. Portico Bowman. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. I printed the portrait on cloth, set it against bands of saturated color, and stitched the seams between them in black chevrons, with handwritten words, "I come to feel heal contribute" on translucent scraps drifting across.
Self-Portrait. Encaustic on cloth with stitching, 12 x 12 in. There is no face here, only what goes on behind one: a single pattern, repeated and repeated until it fills the outline of my head, tilted up toward somewhere past the frame. Ahead of it, my thinking is made visible. Zigzags of navy, crimson and teal thread run restless and angled, like many voices at once, and vertical lines of teal knots keep a steadier beat between them, all laid out in rows and columns like a circuit or a private code.