“I guess there was a feeling of inadequacy, I always felt inadequate as a person. I think that’s very human, just very, unashamedly human. Where I used to see something wrong with that, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that anymore.”
The voice is William’s (pictured above) and overlays pictures of his profile as a 3D scanning device flashes across an obscured face, half of which doesn't work. It remains still when he smiles or grimaces, laughs or cries. William’s face cannot absolutely communicate the things he’s feeling, or react to the things he sees, but he can talk.
He opened up on his experiences as one living with facial nerve paralysis in a series of interviews with contemporary artist and researcher Vic McEwan, who in 2019 embarked on a project to not just tell the stories of those affected by the disability, but allow a small number of them to explore their medical condition in a new way.
In March, hundreds of visitors to the Tate Liverpool museum in the UK heard William’s story. It was the first component of an interactive exhibit titled, ‘If They Spend the Time to Get to Know Me’ - a line lifted from William’s interview and a display that featured a 3D printed replica of his face.
Getting to know William, his experiences and the condition that affects 1.5% of people at some point in their lives, was part of McEwan’s aim. He had teamed up with the Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic in his native Australia, observing the treatment given to patients, before opening up a dialogue to understand more about the emotional and physical experiences and then getting creative. Performative art, visual pieces and video work have all been strings to the McEwan bow as his work continues.
Facial nerve harp.
Facial nerve harp.
Becoming the first contemporary artist to be accepted into the Department of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, McEwan is one in an emerging field of arts practice-led PhD researchers looking to use art to enable ‘knowledge production’. What this entails is everything you’d expect of a traditional thesis – being transparent with the methodologies, articulating the background of the field and detailing important considerations like, for example, the anatomy of the face – while also presenting a body of work through exhibitions, which will also be examined.
“Embodied knowledge,” McEwan calls it. “So much rich information, and what a more standard researcher might call data, has been drawn from that experience at the Tate.”
McEwan’s goal is to explore the effects of facial nerve paralysis in a deeper way. While acknowledging the science of the condition – that when damaged or inflamed the face’s five nerve branches can lose function and reduce the ability for brows, eyelids, cheeks and lips to move – McEwan has sought to determine the impact those inabilities have on the person. “What an astonishing thing to think about,” was his immediate reaction upon learning that some Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic patients couldn’t express their happiness through a smile. What an astonishing thing to have to live with, he would learn.
Facial nerve paralysis
A participant's face being printed on a Prusa machine.
“I was hearing people talk about themselves feeling disembodied from their own face,” McEwan tells TCT, “like their face isn’t a part of them because it doesn’t move anymore. They don’t smile; they feel an emotional sense of happiness, but they look at their face in the mirror and their face isn’t showing happiness. People would talk about not knowing their face and so one of the ways that they are dealing with their illness is in understanding them separate from their face.
“Other people speak about more horrific things; ashamed of it. A lady was speaking about being in fear of when her kids grow up and she has to go to their weddings and school graduations, that she’s going to ruin those events for their kids. She’s thinking, ‘if I place myself in the world, it’s a negative thing, not just for me, but for the people I love.’”
Despite some early hesitance around incorporating technology into a project that is exploring the emotional aspect of how people live with facial nerve paralysis, McEwan had the idea to leverage 3D scanning and 3D printing technology in a way that might help the patients reconnect with their faces. Recreating an exact replica of the patient’s faces digitally with Artec 3D scanning technology and physically with the 3D print – and allow them to follow the process, see the 3D imagery, hold the print in their hands and respond to the technology’s output in the presence of McEwan – enabled McEwan to create several different artworks that were exhibited at the Tate.
“I was completely surprised by the whole process of scanning and printing. It’s a craft, it’s very tactile, it’s not just about G code and computer files and putting that data into a printer, there are so many nuances to how that happens,” McEwan says. “What I was surprised about is the human isn’t removed from it. The patients I work with are very much in their scans, they’re there in their final 3D printed objects that we make and then they’re there in the artworks that we make out of those 3D printed objects.”
At the Tate, Artec’s Eva 3D scanning device and Prusa's i3 mk3 extrusion printers were used to create a facial nerve harp and a wall of faces. The facial nerve harp is a musical instrument based on the scans and prints of a patient’s face, with the five branches that come out of the temporal bone and spread across the face, representing a harp’s strings, able to yield a melody. McEwan says it ‘gives a voice’ to the part of the faces that no longer works. Meanwhile, the wall of faces was made up of patients and visitors alike, with 3D prints being continuously added to display throughout the exhibition thanks to the two Prusa machines working overnight at the Tate.
Modelling inside the Artec Studio software. Facial nerve
Modelling inside the Artec Studio software.
“It’s been a really rich exploration of scanning and printing,” McEwan says. “We’re starting to find all these artistic outcomes from every step, particularly in the Artec [Studio] software. Visually, some of the ways you can view those images, as they’re being captured and after they’ve been captured, are really beautiful; there’s poetry to some of them, they are quite visually stunning. And to scan somebody’s face who experiences facial difference, somebody who struggles with their profile or the spotlight being put on them, and then [for them] to stop and look at the images they see, they see [them] as being beautiful.
“By seeing that beauty of the way those images look in a computer before we’ve even done anything with the scan, I witness patients have a real wonder about their face. They’re not having a fear about their face, they’re having a wonder and that allows them to enter into their face again, rather than step away from it.”
While McEwan’s artwork and thesis intends to explore the emotional and physical impact of facial nerve paralysis, to educate and raise awareness of the condition too, the process of replicating patients' faces and the raw, personal discussions around it, have been somewhat therapeutic for many of the subjects of McEwan’s study.
As the flashes cease, the full face of William finally appears against a dark backdrop, his eyes blinking not exactly in tandem and while his mouth raises only half a smile, his eyes convey a complete one.
He continues: “Emotions don’t have to be a physical manifestation as much as they’re a metaphysical manifestation. I can be happy without outwardly projecting that. I don’t need a physical vessel to be happy and I’m quite content with my face at the moment. I’m becoming more accepting of it and it’s because I feel intrinsically very, very happy with who I am as a person.”
William, who lives with facial nerve paralysis, talks to Vic McEwan.
