Category Archives: Liquid Face

Liquid Face

Liquid Face is a close-up of the artist’s face while he is in freefall. It emerged out of the Turning Point video installation. The artist noticed that people were as interested in what the wind was doing to the bodies as any concept he had in mind. So, he decided to focus on this small aspect of the freefall experience. The challenge was to relax his face and let the wind take control.

“The images, looped, run by in slow motion creating, paradoxically, a suitable mood for the contemplation of a body falling at a speed of almost 200 km/h. On his face, assailed by the wind, a crowd of emotions rushes by, uncontrolled and lacking meaning. Shaped by irregular blasts of air, the mouth and supple flesh of the cheeks lightly softened by age, lose their consistency. All of this happens without the artist’s gaze once leaving the camera’s lens. There is no point in struggling before the clear inevitability of the condition that weighs us down. In representing himself in a position he cannot completely control—speech being impractical and gesture greatly reduced—even as he deliberately puts aside any search for “Beauty”, Litherland offers, of himself, an image turning round self-mockery.”
(Nathalie de Blois)