Surrounding Face by Will Harris and Aisha Farr

"The idea for our poster began with Van Gogh’s painting of a moth with a face on its back. In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh misidentified the moth as a ‘death’s head’ (its distinctive skull shape made famous by Silence of the Lambs). The painting was later renamed when it was determined to have been a ‘great peacock’ moth. In light of that, we wanted to explore how classification can derail our perception. Aisha’s work recently has involved taking images and then cutting out and rearranging aspects of them before re-incorporating them into the image itself, half camouflaged. Somewhere in the poster a small forward slash lingers to one side of a rectangular piece of the image. This piece was selected then copied and pasted from the original image, before being dragged and dropped to cover over the words ‘death’s head’ and ‘great peacock’ which were typed either side of the slash. The computerised version of the photograph and the typed words are in some way immaterial but also there as notional traces of material things. There were several alternative drafts of the poster: different moths in different locations. The faces grafted onto the moth’s backs were created using GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) software, which generates images out of text. Van Gogh’s work reminds us that the perception of a person can never meet the world outside of them. The way of working we found – mixing digital and photographic material instead of paint – felt like a way of explaining this quality in his work, and this complex relationship. It also chimed with our recent experiences, that of feeling embedded and sometimes lost in overfamiliar surroundings, unable to identify ourselves."

  - Will Harris and Aisha Farr

Product Information

420 x 594 mm (A2)
Digital Print on 230gsm Matt Paper
Edition of 45 (plus 5 APs)

About the Artist

Will Harris is a London-based poet and critic. He is the author of RENDANG (2020) and Mixed-Race Superman (2018).

Aisha Farr is an artist / writer who works in adult education and community outreach in London. Some of her poetry has appeared in Zarf, Project Self Detective, Prototype 2 and with the art project plumbing wine : http://www.plumbing.wine/aisha_farr.html. A few of her weavings and paintings can be seen on the website www.aishafarr.com. She is currently working on a collaborative film titled Terrormar.