Aesthetics, we all devise an ideology in our minds of how everything should look, we even have ideas for how the human face should be. Studies have proven that people tend to find a face more aesthetically pleasing when symmetry is involved, so when an image of the face is so deliberately distorted and disfigured how do you think this would make the viewer feel?

Julie Cockburn uses found imagery and manipulates them in different ways, she states “no image is safe after it’s entered my studio.” Cockburn’s piece The Lioness (2014) challenges the whole concept of an aesthetically pleasing photographic image of a person’s face. The geometric pattern used to cut up and mirror different areas of the face could be used as a metaphor, for how we idealize those who have symmetrical features. Yet this face has been mirrored so many times that it is no longer aesthetically pleasing to look at. Cockburn’s image makes the viewer uncomfortable, she has drawn out the person from the photograph and created a character from her own imagination. Also with these fragments, she has destroyed the memory which could have been locked within the image. However, you could suggest that Cockburn is inserting new life into forgotten and mundane images.

Why does looking at distorted imagery of a person’s face make the viewer so uncomfortable? This is a question which I would like to explore within the theory of my work. And it is a question which I believe Cockburn must have raised when creating her pieces.