Three dried seed pods, split open to show their packed interiors, arranged on a single woody stem that runs straight down the centre of a face. The pods sit high — one over each cheekbone, one in the middle where the bridge of the nose should be — and the stem descends past the nostrils to finish exactly on the lower lip. Below and around: skin, an eyebrow at the top left, a mouth in soft grey. Black and white, very close, the pods considerably sharper than the person.
My first thought was that they looked like something and I could not say what. A moth, possibly. A heraldic device. Three small boats. I spent longer than I should have trying to identify the plant — cacao is my best guess, from the ribbing and the way the seeds are stacked — before accepting that identification was beside the point, since whatever they are they were dead well before this photograph, dried to the colour of old wood, and are here for their architecture rather than their species.
What stays with me is the stem on the lip. Everything else in the frame could be a styling decision, but that last inch, where the dry stick meets the wet mouth, is a physical fact that must have been mildly unpleasant to hold in place for the length of a session. Naomi Chin Wing's name is in the title and almost none of her is in the picture — an eyebrow, a nose, a mouth — and yet the mouth is doing the work. It is the only part of the image that is alive, and it has been given the job of holding up the dead part.
Three dried seed pods, split open to show their packed interiors, arranged on a single woody stem that runs straight down the centre of a face. The pods sit high — one over each cheekbone, one in the middle where the bridge of the nose should be — and the stem descends past the nostrils to finish exactly on the lower lip. Below and around: skin, an eyebrow at the top left, a mouth in soft grey. Black and white, very close, the pods considerably sharper than the person.
My first thought was that they looked like something and I could not say what. A moth, possibly. A heraldic device. Three small boats. I spent longer than I should have trying to identify the plant — cacao is my best guess, from the ribbing and the way the seeds are stacked — before accepting that identification was beside the point, since whatever they are they were dead well before this photograph, dried to the colour of old wood, and are here for their architecture rather than their species.
What stays with me is the stem on the lip. Everything else in the frame could be a styling decision, but that last inch, where the dry stick meets the wet mouth, is a physical fact that must have been mildly unpleasant to hold in place for the length of a session. Naomi Chin Wing's name is in the title and almost none of her is in the picture — an eyebrow, a nose, a mouth — and yet the mouth is doing the work. It is the only part of the image that is alive, and it has been given the job of holding up the dead part.