One Hundred Faces

During one of the team projects at W.S.A. I had painted/drawn with brush, pen and ink, several small faces. On seeing them displayed on my studio wall, I decided that I would paint a further one hundred of them. This was to be a performative piece focusing on each person whilst I drew. I knew exactly the faces I would use! For many years I had viewed with awe, a family photograph taken in Poland in 1938. It was the  family’s last meal together before they were rounded up and taken to the ghetto then on to die in concentration camps. I took photographs of each person, zooming in to make them vague, shadowy and distorted. Drawings of photographs of photographs of photographs. An act of "Post Memory" - a term explained by Marianne Hirsch when we make up our own ideas about someone we only know from a photograph.

Images below are from my One Hundred Faces project:

Shadows

Following the "Faces" project, I started to paint larger, looser images of the faces in brown ink and indigo watercolour. I wanted to use these distorted photographs of photographs as a metaphor for fading intergenerational memory. The distortion of memory over time. The faces are fading, as if from time, and intergenerational  remembering, that is, fading further with every generation. Traces of the trauma remain as does the urge to create and remember. There are also references in the installation below to Chagall's ‘White Crucifixion’ and Barnett Newman's ‘Stations of The Cross’.