Faces began with an attention to small psychological moments that are easy to dismiss because they seem too ordinary, awkward or fleeting to be important. The urge to leave a place without explanation, the exhaustion of making a decision, the sudden question of whether you want something at all, an almost irrational burst of confidence, or the point at which thinking simply ends with “whatever.” I wanted to give these temporary states the same weight we usually reserve for emotions that appear more dramatic or easier to name.

The portraits do not describe fixed personalities. Each one holds a person inside a particular mental instant, often at the point where thought begins to affect expression, gesture or behaviour. Sometimes the body reveals an emotion before it has been consciously acknowledged. At other times a short phrase becomes enough to contain an entire psychological condition. The titles function in this way as fragments of inner speech, phrases that seem casual but carry a much larger emotional structure underneath them.

Around the faces, I built dense frames from miniature objects, sweets, bottles, imitation jewels, toys and fragments of familiar consumer imagery. Their brightness and almost compulsive abundance sit against the quieter psychological tension of the portraits. I see these objects as part of the emotional environment rather than as decoration. They introduce pleasure, distraction, absurdity and excess into situations that are otherwise deeply private.

Throughout the series, I was drawn to the discrepancy between what an experience looks like from the outside and how intensely it can be felt internally. A bored expression, an inappropriate gesture or a simple sentence can appear insignificant, yet contain frustration, resistance, anxiety, desire or relief. Faces is built around these small ruptures, moments when the controlled social surface becomes thin enough for something less processed and more immediate to appear.