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LIVING HEAD
2018
8 x 12 x 10cm
Agar Jelly
Above left
LIVING HEAD (IN VIVARIUM)
2019 – on-going
34 X 68 X 34cm
Agar jelly, wood, perspex, metal,
thermostatically controlled heating element
Above right:
LIVING HEAD (STOP MOTION FILM)
2019 – on-going
Dimensions vary
Video
Most portraits are inanimate copies of living (or once living) people. Artists try to overcome this innate contradiction by using a variety of techniques such as caricature, rough modelling and absolute physiognomic and colour fidelity to inject life into their portraits, which, nevertheless, remain physiologically inert.
In the Living Head series Jeans casts portraits in agar jelly, a substance more commonly used to culture bacteria in petri dishes. Unlike with conventional bronze and plaster portraits, the bacterial spores floating in the air settle on these agar portraits and feed off the heads, creating moulds which colonise and overwhelm their human subjects’ individual features. The agar also dries out, shrinking, splitting and warping in the process. This biological invasion and natural desiccation brings the initially inert portraits literally back to life, but in a form unrecognisable as the original sitter, taking the normal ambitions of portraiture to a logical, but unexpected, conclusion.
Living Head shows a fully colonised and desiccated portrait. Living Head (In Vivarium) shows the temperature and humidity controlled set-up used for Living Head (Stop Motion Animation), an on-going project.