The life or death mask is in many ways the sculptural analogue of
the photographic portrait. Both suggest direct traces from life,
involve positive and negative, and evoke a mysterious connection
between a living, breathing subject and a captured image. The drive
to capture true likenesses in the early 19th century was partly
generated by the pseudo- science of phrenology. As a by-product of
this, cast collections such as those of the Edinburgh Phrenological
Society, have preserved haunting likenesses via life and death
masks from individuals living 150 to over 200 years ago.Through her
photographs Joanna Kane has taken these subjects out of the
categories and hierarchies of their phrenological context. They no
longer appear as disembodied scientific specimens, but as
photographically embodied portraits of individual men and women -
many of whom lived before the invention or popular use of
photography. The title, "The Somnambulists", is a reference to
mesmerism and phreno-mesmerism, which were current at the time from
which many of the casts originate from. The resulting portraits
appear to exist in an ambiguous suspended state between life, death
and sleep.
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