Profiles Series I, II and III (Profiles I 2001; Profiles II 2002; Profiles III 2005-6)

The research field is collaborative photographic portraiture. Profiles is an extended series of works inspired by Piero della Francesca’s diptych of Battista Sforza and Federico Montefeltro c. 1470. Against a neural background, fourteen people were photographed in strict symmetrical profile. The individual portraits were created and then divided into seven pairs, and hung face to face. The aim of the practice-based research was to discover if the apparent psychology of sitters for portraits was ever present or if a more neutral approach could be just or even more revealing. As the portraits were hung face to face they appeared, somewhat in the vein of Piero della Francesca’s painting to be coupled. The profiles present the viewer with the contours of faces, jaws, hairlines but the transient characteristics of facial expression are not revealed. The gazes are fixed, reciprocated but disengaged and unsentimental. The viewer is clearly present but blocked and not, as in so much portraiture, in a closer, intimate relationship to the subject. The work was shown in a solo exhibition at Victoria Miro Gallery, London 2002. Profiles II and III extended the series specifically in relation to babies as portrait subjects. Photographed in profile and three times larger than life size they appear almost monumental and emptied out of the usual meanings that we tend to associate with infants.Profiles was part of a British Council touring exhibition. J. J. Charlesworth reviewed Profiles in Art Monthly (Dec/Jan 2002-03 number 262) noting how she forces a starkly scientific frame on her anonymous, uniformly dressed subjects, a technique that still produces an intense individuality through its obsessive intense detail.”