New portrait selected from 12,000 submissions for The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2014.
Brow, cheek, nose, jaw, ear, lips, neck is a portrait of Jane, a Leicestershire dairy farmer with 130 milking cows in her herd. The image is created by pinning thousands of garment labels onto canvas to reflect facial anatomy and the patterns produced by hair and clothing. Jane has evolved from a process of assembling 30,000 used labels, and questions the idea of branding by literally describing specific facial features. The navy blue background label is woven with the words, ‘part of a two piece set’, and refers to a second portrait of an Ayrshire calf reared by Jane on the farm.