Making Faces

The lives of all of us are dominated by our need to look at and interact with the faces of others. We detect emotion, we know whose face it is we are talking to, we fall in love with them, and we make images of them. This obsession is reflected in the close attention of both scientists and artists to faces in general and to particular faces. The British Association’s annual Festival of Science in September 2006 will be held in Norwich and to mark this, The Norfolk Contemporary Arts Association, in partnership with the John Innes Centre, the Teacher Scientist Network and the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts will stage an exhibition in the Forum, called Making Faces.

The exhibition will have at its core a body of commissioned artwork from three UK artists, who will have been interacting over the year with a panel of leading UK scientists working on various aspects of face biology. Areas of concern will include how faces are made in the womb, how neural activity in our brains allows us to identify and understand faces and their associated expressions and transformations and how we construct gender, age, and ethnicity from a glance. The exhibition will parallel a main science session at the BA meeting on the same topic, and a major output will be an illustrated book/catalogue that will reflect some of the ethical and social issues thrown up by contemporary research in the area, as well as charting the artists response to these concerns. The exhibition is funded by a Society Award grant from the Wellcome Trust.

The three artists who have been commissioned are Simon Tegala, Keith Piper and Alexa Wright, and the exhibition will be held in the Forum in Norwich City centre, UK for the whole of the month of September, 2006.

August 28th: Making Faces: the book, is available Sept 1st 2006 from us at £5 (+p&p) see The Book

September 3rd: Interviews with the artists now up on the site (Quicktime needed) see Interviews

September 10th: The exhibition has now been open to the public for the week of the BA festival. We estimate that about 5000 have seen it already.  For images of the installations see the individual artists pages

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