The Faces They Made

I was in college when my mum’s friend Pauline got me a job as an art model.

Pauline, incidentally, is the woman who thinks men should be born without penises. Anyway, I digress.

Mum and Pauline both worked in Adult Education, and one evening they told me there was an evening sculpture class that needed someone to sit for them. The assignment for the term: the participants were going to create a clay bust of my head.

I was going to get paid. All I had to do was sit still. I was excited, and I had absolutely no idea what I was actually signing up for.

Turns out I was being paid to sit completely motionless for two hours every Thursday evening, for the next eight weeks.

That sounds easy. It isn't. About thirty seconds after somebody tells you that you cannot touch your face, your face becomes the itchiest face that has ever existed. Your nose itches. Then your eyebrow. Then there's a single hair against your cheek you hadn't noticed until this exact second and now it's unbearable. You become aware of your tongue, your jaw, your shoulders, the exact position of your hands, whether you're blinking too much. You want to scratch, stretch, sigh, smile — do literally anything that confirms you're still a functioning human being. You can't. You just sit.

And there was the positioning, which I hadn't really considered either. I wasn't sitting at the same level as everyone else — I was perched on a chair, on top of two tables, raised well above the rest of the room so that all ten of them could see me properly. Which meant that for two solid hours every Thursday, I was quite literally on exhibit. Ten sets of eyeballs studying my face from below. Not glancing. Studying. The shape of my nose, the distance between my eyes, the curve of my cheek, my jaw, my mouth. People would walk right up with rulers and measure the distances between my features — eye to eye, nose to mouth, forehead to chin — things I had never once thought to measure and certainly never imagined anyone else would. Every so often someone would lift a Polaroid camera and flash it directly in my face, to take back to their clay and check some detail against it.

There's something strange about being looked at that intently for that long, with nowhere to hide. I couldn't choose a flattering angle. Couldn't adjust my expression to seem friendlier. Couldn't do any of the small automatic things we all do when we know we're being watched. I just had to let my face be my face, and let ten strangers take it apart, piece by piece. Oddly, it turned into a strange kind of lesson in self-acceptance — you become remarkably at peace with your own nose and cheekbones when you've got no choice but to hand them over for inspection, week after week.

By the end of it, I was genuinely excited to see what they'd made. I wanted to know whether any of them had captured me — not just my features, but something underneath them. Some essence, some expression I didn't know I carried. Maybe that's a slightly vain thing to admit wanting. I wanted it anyway.

When the sculptures were finished, none of them looked like me. Not really. After eight weeks of sitting there — the itching, the rulers, the Polaroids, all those eyeballs — I'd half expected ten small clay versions of myself lined up around the room. Instead there were ten completely different people. Fragments of me were in there somewhere: one had something like my nose, another had caught the shape of my mouth. But nothing that, on its own, was recognisably me.

At first that felt like a disappointment. All that sitting, and nobody had quite managed to make me.

But the longer I thought about it, the more interesting it became — far more interesting, actually, than if they'd simply succeeded. Because each bust looked like its own maker. One had the artist's own nose. Another had their cheeks, their chin, their particular way of setting the eyes. It wasn't my face they'd spent eight weeks with, not really. It was their own.

Think about whose face you actually study most closely in an entire lifetime. Not mine. Not anyone else's. Your own — the one staring back at you in the mirror every single morning, the one you've lived inside for as long as you've been alive. That's the face each of them knew in their hands, in their fingers, in whatever unconscious sense of proportion gets built from decades of looking at yourself. So when they sat in front of me with a lump of clay, trying to recreate what they saw, what came out instead was the face they knew best — their own, wearing a small amount of borrowed detail from mine.

Ten people sat in the same room, looking at exactly the same face, for exactly the same hours, with exactly the same rulers. And what came out the other end was ten different faces, each one quietly signed by its maker.

I went into that classroom expecting to leave with ten versions of myself. I left with something better — ten strangers, each one having accidentally shown me their own face while trying to sculpt mine.