Install and Artist Statement

Untitled

Lauren Simons, 2025

This body of work engages with the disruption of traditional portraiture by deliberately fragmenting and reconfiguring the face. The drawings are split into halves, their sides exchanged to produce an altered likeness that destabilises conventions of cohesion and recognisability within portraiture. In this process of splitting and reconfiguration, unexpected collisions of form begin to emerge, guiding the eye from one page to the next. Hidden faces also appear between pages that had no initial link.

Leaning into my own neurodivergent trait of abnormal facial recognition (commonly referred to as facial blindness), these works stage the instability of recognition as both subject and method. The enlarged, displaced eyes generate a deliberately anomalous face, closely depicting how I encounter others. The incorporation of light-reactive blinking, produced through the Samoiloff effect (a phenomena produced by the interaction between the additive RGB and subtractive CMY colour models), extends this instability by introducing still movement that unsettles the static conventions of portraiture.

The development of this series of drawings has raised the questions, in what ways can contemporary art function as a tool for communicating non-normative cognitive perspective? And in what ways can the disruption of traditional portrait formats reflect neurodivergent modes of thinking or being?

Series of Drawings

Pencil, charcoal and chalk pastel

415mm x 292mm