Virtual Eye – The Idea

Origins

When I first explored the idea of a `Faceless Portrait’, triggered by an exhibition at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne in November 2016, I began by collecting sets of objects, each an honest representation of who I am. I believe that a single representative image to sum up an individual is a nonsense, we are all more complex and multi-faceted than that, so I set out to produce multiple sets of objects, each a `Faceless Portrait’.

After one day’s work, I was surprised to find myself with twenty sets of images, each of which I recognised as representing me.

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The idea of a `Faceless Portrait` continued to metamorphose as I examined the representation of self. 

My Face Is Not Me

I made a digital representation of my head, and looked to camouflage it with the sets of photographic images. 

The images wrapped around the face present aspects of personality that are missing from a traditional portrait, but they also camouflage and influence perception. The wrapped image reveals something of the person without the traditional access of a sculpted head. The resulting image disrupts rather than excludes the face. 

Inside looking out
I collect, make, do, and see.
My face is not me.

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`Virtual Eye` is an extension of `Faceless Portrait`(2017) and `Virtually Me`(2018).

Towards Virtual Eye

I believe in interdependence, it is our connectedness to other people that gives our life meaning, as such this work seeks an extension; it requires faceless portraits of others.

We constantly create incidental portraits of ourselves, images left in our environment and in the memories of others. Life as a series of self-presentations. Never before have we exposed and self-curated our personal image as we do now with social media. Each new presentation develops an increasingly complex, multidimensional sense of an individual.

I intend to create and share an exhibition for digital space by producing a set of virtual portraits. I will do this by using social media to invite participants via Twitter exchanges (conversations) to explore the idea of self in a digital age. Participants will be supported in developing a vocabulary of objects. Each object selected is a metaphor potentially existing at one or more communicative levels – universal, cultural, subcultural, personal. They will select, photograph and share images of objects that each individual identifies as a non-verbal means of describing themselves