Here's Looking at You

This exhibition examined Mark Fairnington’s investigation of the portrait in many different forms. The intimate paintings of his twin sons at different stages of their childhood record the different images that they embody as they grow. Our identities throughout are lives are framed by different ideas, some we cling on to and others we resist. The two children were often identified as the twins, red heads, the boys and people regularly confused one with the other.

Paintings from the Wellcome Collection storage facility re-imagine human images: miniature portraits of anatomical heads, wax heads, death masks and skulls; poised between life and death. The Wellcome collection became a story of how the human body has been perceived, understood and studied in different cultures. It is a place where the histories of art and science criss-cross and intertwine. The paintings document and describe some of the objects contained in the Wellcome, situating them within the historical context of portrait and still life painting. The human figure is present here as specimen and image and in the form of objects made to fit the body, operate upon it, injure, disguise, protect, embellish and contain it. In the paintings faces and heads are re-presented as miniature portraits.

Fairnington’s paintings use photography as a way of recording information, a way of eroding the hierarchy between parts of the subject, rendering every part as if they are of equal significance. In the eye paintings, a single eye on a round wooden panel is all that is depicted, echoing Victorian keepsakes. In these Lovers’ Eyes the portrait embodies the act of possession; a person captured, collected, possessed by another.

The most recent painting in the show is a portrait of an imagined figure from the landscape, a character that may in part be a self-portrait, fecund with growths and protuberances on the trunks of dead trees.

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