off with their heads

When I was a child I found some pictorial conventions hard to cope with. Marble torsos in particular horrified me. How could people revere those celebrations of mutilation? Portrait heads I found less horrifying, but still puzzling. It seemed odd to display the monarch's severed head on a coin.

The silhouette portraits of French aristocrats that were fashionable in the later 18th century gave me an opportunity to bring out the ludicrous and sinister implications of this portrait technique. I made a series showing victims of the Terror of the 1790s, their heads severed by pictorial convention or by the guillotine.