Faces - I

There are some faces that do not belong to a person but are abstractions, of ideas and times. A model’s face splashed on a magazine cover does not belong to her – it is a tablet etched with the ideas which a time – a place – the people inhabiting that intersection – define themselves with; a mirror they hold to themselves. It is the makers of opinions, the shapers of thought, who give these incorporeal ideas – of beauty, of virility, of fertility –a shape: tangible, seeable, sellable. Strokes of fingers, of scalpel, transmuting them to the lump of human clay – pressing, pulling, squeezing – fluting its curves, chiselling its features, carving its angles – and a face emerges. A vessel; scourged and emptied of its own idea – eviscerated; reduced to a container. To be broken and buried in the shifting space of time; and new vessels to be fashioned from its shards in their turns.