By Oliver Jones | Email to a friend | Digg |
Published: Friday 18 Sep 2009
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I am an artist living and working in Birmingham, having graduated from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design with a First Class Honours degree in Fine art.

My childhood and education was spent in rural Shropshire until I moved to the city to study at Margaret Street School of Art. It is this dramatic change of environments that has led me to become perceptive and highly analytical of the world around us. This critique with regards to my most recent work is the face. It is one of the most abundant and influential cues in our society and media, yet due to its abundance has the capacity within our perception to be one of the most overlooked and disregarded. My examination extends from exploring its role in society and the media to its bond with identity and to how other individuals react and respond to it.

We see thousands of faces every day; in the street, in advertising in our wallets even on our credit cards - to name but a few. Take the passport photograph as an example; the portrait is supposed to represent one’s self, however in taking the photo the strict guidelines on how it is required to be taken mean you cannot bare your teeth, have too much shine from your face, have your eyes too widely open and this does,in fact, impedes this very objective. This is as a result of our access to the instantaneous technological portrait, immediately deleted, presented and enhanced to be the image that we believe to be ourselves. We have grown so used to these kinds of portraits that we have become receptive and even indifferent to them; accepting them as the norm. In this way we are uneasy in accepting anything contrary to the posed, fake and deceitful view of perfection and of ourselves.

The media is a powerful ambassador for the portrayal of such an image, therefore I adopt similar techniques in my work to ‘re-advertise’ and exemplify a more common and natural image of the face.

Examples of my work: