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What Happens to a Face When It Repeats?

 

Notes from making Ìṣura: Treasure of Faces.

I have been repeating faces.

The same basic form returns across the surface of a new work, but the more I repeat it, the less interested I become in whether the faces are actually the same.

A template suggests sameness.

You begin from one shape.

You draw it again.

Cut it again.

Place it again.

But once that shape enters another material, something begins to shift.

One face is cut from Adire.

Another meets coffee-dyed textile.

Another sits beside a studio-dyed surface.

Some remain almost intact.

Others are interrupted.

Some are partly covered by another layer.

Circular openings cut through parts of the surface, allowing something underneath to appear.

The repetition is there, but sameness becomes difficult to maintain.

That has become one of the things keeping me inside the work.

 

 

 

The face

 

I have been thinking about the face as something through which we try to read another person.

We look at faces constantly.

We search them for recognition.

Emotion.

Intention.

Familiarity.

Difference.

But a face does not necessarily give us everything.

Something can be visible and still remain private.

A person can be looking directly at us and still be unreadable.

That tension became more interesting to me as the repeated faces developed across the painting.

At first I was thinking about what repeating the same basic face might do.

Would it create sameness?

Would it flatten individuality?

Would it make one face disappear into another?

Instead, the materials began resisting the idea that repetition automatically produces identical things.

The pattern changed the face.

Colour changed it.

Cutting changed it.

The position changed it.

Whatever appeared behind an opening changed it again.

The form repeated.

The experience of the form did not.

 

 

Cutting into the surface

 

The circular apertures became particularly important.

A hole sounds like an absence.

Something has been removed.

But in the work, removing one part of the surface often allowed another part to become visible.

The underlayer appeared through the opening.

So I began thinking differently about disappearance.

I could cut something away and reveal rather than simply erase.

That became a useful studio question:

 

 

 

Can disappearance also be a form of appearance?

 

I don't think I have an answer.

The physical process itself is what interests me.

A surface conceals another surface.

Then cutting exposes part of what had been concealed.

Another layer can cover it again.

Appearance.

Disappearance.

Appearance again.

The painting begins to move between those conditions without actually moving.

 

 

 

Repetition and recognition

 

There is something reassuring about repetition.

Once we have seen a shape several times, we begin to think we know it.

The eye learns the pattern.

But repetition can also make us less attentive.

We stop looking because we assume we already know what is there.

That is partly why I have been interested in interrupting the repeated face.

A circle cuts through it.

A material changes.

A pattern becomes louder.

Another becomes quieter.

An edge breaks.

Suddenly the familiar form requires attention again.

The repeated face becomes a way of asking how quickly recognition becomes assumption.

How much do we actually see when we think we already know what we are looking at?

 

 

 

Desire and looking

 

A further question entering my thinking is desire.

What makes us continue looking at another face?

Beauty may be part of it.

Colour may be part of it.

Recognition may be part of it.

But I am still working out what I mean when I connect the face to desire, pleasure or attraction.

I do not want to resolve that question simply because the painting is now finished.

Some parts of a work become clear during making.

Others become the next thing to investigate.

 

 

For now, I am interested in the fact that the face can invite looking while also refusing complete access.

 

Ìṣura: Treasure of Faces 2026 Adire, coffee-dyed textile and studio-dyed textile on canvas 120 × 180 cm Unique Original / One of a Kind

 

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