The image you see at the start and finish of the Future Face exhibition at the Science Museum is a massive, blown-up photograph of a sculpture by Franz Xavier Messerschmidt. Called The Yawner, the black, 18th-century bust is of a man mid-yawn, though his expression - mouth wide open, eyes and nose screwed up - could equally be one of great pain or hysterical laughter.
It is the image the exhibition's curator, Sandra Kemp, says she wanted people to have in mind as they went around the show, an image that is aesthetic but also acts as an example of what that face is capable of. 'I wanted people to see the full expressive potential of the face,' she says. '[The bust] could be poured in oil. I find it more and more beautiful.'
The exhibition, which explores the questions of what faces are, how they are portrayed and interpreted and what they will look like in the future, is the first the 47-year-old Kemp has curated on her own. But that has brought advantages, she explains as she shows me around.
'One of the good things about not being established is that I could think out of the box,' she says. 'I wanted to put art and science on an equal footing, but I also wanted the first impression to be ravishing. I wanted to make people think with their eyes as well as their minds. I wanted it to be an assault on the senses.'
Kemp is talking to me while her son Jack, 11, waits patiently for us to finish. It's half-term week and Jack is buried in E Nesbit's Five Children and It, which will be released in cinemas soon. But his attention was brought to the book by his mother, who edited and introduced the Penguin edition.
Kemp's background is in literature. As an undergraduate she studied English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she also did her doctorate on Rudyard Kipling's hidden narratives, which was published in 1987. She soon began writing about visual culture, particularly portraiture, as well as literature.
She held lectureships in English departments of several universities in Britain, including being appointed a professor at the University of Westminster, before landing her current job as the director of research at the Royal College of Art.
The movement from literature towards art has been no accident and goes back to her childhood. Growing up in Finchley, north London, she was often taken to museums and galleries by her mother, alongside her two sisters and brother. But although going to art galleries became the focus of Kemp's teenage years, she decided against studying art history at university.
'Neither of my parents were university educated and they didn't think that art history was a proper academic subject so they wanted me to do something else. But from the moment I graduated I've been edging back to visual art. Aesthetic objects, things of beauty, have always mattered to me.'
The idea for Future Face came out of research she was doing while she was a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington five years ago. Originally she was interested in looking at the effect of digital technology on portraiture, but as she dug further the connections between scientific approaches to the face and artistic ones became more and more apparent. Her research took her into psychology, neurophysiology, forensics and surgery, as well as fine art, and all these areas have contributed to the Future Face exhibition.
It was also out of this research that she set up the Centre for Arts, Research, Technology and Education and an MA in visual culture at the University of Westminster. The idea was to build on the multi-disciplinary connections she had found, allowing students to explore different aspects of visual culture from theoretical and historical perspectives to the role of digital technology.
Having been involved in discussions with the British Museum about its own visual culture centre, she was able to bring it on board as a partner for the MA. She was also able to persuade the National Portrait Gallery to be a partner, as she was doing much of her own research there.
Both institutions now teach modules on the course. Graduates from the MA have become curators at museums and galleries and have gone into academia. Kemp left Westminster in the first year of the MA when the job at the Royal College of Art came up in 2000.
When she first started talking to the Science Museum about doing an exhibition, the museum was interested in one to coincide with the anniversary of the discovery of DNA. She rejected that as she didn't want to do something where art was used to 'exemplify' science.
At the time the Wellcome Trust was planning a series of exhibitions in collaboration with the Science Museum that aimed to promote a 'new dialogue between art and science'. Andrew Nahum, the principle curator of transport technologies at the Science Museum and also on the committee for the Wellcome Wing exhibitions, knew Kemp and her work and suggested she sent a proposal for what became Future Face.
But in spite of the stated aim of the series of exhibitions, Kemp says the hardest part of the project was getting the Wellcome Trust and the Science Museum to see the relationship between art and science in a new way.
'The show could easily have been at the National Portrait Gallery, but part of the point was to stage an exhibition like this in the Science Museum,' she says. 'The hardest thing was getting people in the science world to see that artists are asking equally pressing questions and that the knowledge they gain is as radical and as valuable.
'I wanted to show that artists and scientists were exploring the same questions and are learning from each other. For example, at the moment, perhaps surprisingly, forensic scientists are learning from technological developments in Hollywood.'
Nahum praises Future Face, and says the museum has been interested in the relationship between art and science for some time. 'We appreciate the value of art as a way of knowing, understanding and feeling that is equally as valid as the methods of science,' he says. 'We don't have a crude utilitarian view of science or see it as having primacy over other fields of endeavour.'
Kemp's reference to forensic scientists learning from Hollywood brings up the Science Museum exhibitions on James Bond and Star Wars and whether it has been dumbing down. Kemp believes it is not so much the subject matter as the way the exhibitions are done.
'I did think the Star Wars exhibition was dumbed down, but I didn't see the one on James Bond. The problem with [those kind of exhibitions] is that they are not primarily drawing on the expertise of the resident curators. I think what the museum is doing now, taking its own collections and reviving them, is much more interesting. But as the government directs lottery funding to things it was never set up for, like health and education, there is less and less money for the museum and gallery sector.'
Kemp's own exhibition had a budget of £200,000, which came from the Wellcome Trust. Of that, £60,000 was spent on the build and £40,000 on the design, which was by Morag Myerscough and Hut architects.
It has two interactives, a computer-generated face that seems to 'engage' by locking on to the face of whoever is speaking and a computer programme that 'morphs' visitors faces to show them what they will look like when they are old. There are also two pieces of commissioned art.
She chose and interpreted all the objects herself. In many cases it took a lot of work to get the objects once she had chosen them, particularly the art. 'The question was always the context - why in the Science Museum? I had to really persuade the artists that the art wasn't being used to illustrate and market science.'
She was helped by the fact that she and Myerscough had constructed a 3 foot by 6 foot model of the exhibition and placed every object. This meant she could tell the artists exactly how their piece would relate to the others.
Another point of debate was whether to warn visitors that some of the material could be disturbing. The exhibits include pictures of people before, during and after reconstructive surgery, and the preserved face of a child that had smallpox.
Kemp took advice from a society that represents people with facial disfigurement. Its view, which reflected her own, was that labelling the exhibits as 'disturbing' would help perpetuate the problems the exhibition explores - the fact that people often judge the value of a person by their face - so she settled on a single warning at the entrance of the exhibition.
It was an issue that went to the heart of the exhibition. For in spite of the fact that she wanted it to be beautiful, underlying the show is a message about the dangers of turning aesthetic reactions into value judgements.
'This is a moment when we should be asking moral and ethical questions about face transplants, particularly in an age when we are so used to seeing touched-up faces in magazines that we forget they're not real. I wanted people to think about faces that aren't perfected because of how society regards and treats people without perfect faces.'
It is the image the exhibition's curator, Sandra Kemp, says she wanted people to have in mind as they went around the show, an image that is aesthetic but also acts as an example of what that face is capable of. 'I wanted people to see the full expressive potential of the face,' she says. '[The bust] could be poured in oil. I find it more and more beautiful.'
The exhibition, which explores the questions of what faces are, how they are portrayed and interpreted and what they will look like in the future, is the first the 47-year-old Kemp has curated on her own. But that has brought advantages, she explains as she shows me around.
'One of the good things about not being established is that I could think out of the box,' she says. 'I wanted to put art and science on an equal footing, but I also wanted the first impression to be ravishing. I wanted to make people think with their eyes as well as their minds. I wanted it to be an assault on the senses.'
Kemp is talking to me while her son Jack, 11, waits patiently for us to finish. It's half-term week and Jack is buried in E Nesbit's Five Children and It, which will be released in cinemas soon. But his attention was brought to the book by his mother, who edited and introduced the Penguin edition.
Kemp's background is in literature. As an undergraduate she studied English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she also did her doctorate on Rudyard Kipling's hidden narratives, which was published in 1987. She soon began writing about visual culture, particularly portraiture, as well as literature.
She held lectureships in English departments of several universities in Britain, including being appointed a professor at the University of Westminster, before landing her current job as the director of research at the Royal College of Art.
The movement from literature towards art has been no accident and goes back to her childhood. Growing up in Finchley, north London, she was often taken to museums and galleries by her mother, alongside her two sisters and brother. But although going to art galleries became the focus of Kemp's teenage years, she decided against studying art history at university.
'Neither of my parents were university educated and they didn't think that art history was a proper academic subject so they wanted me to do something else. But from the moment I graduated I've been edging back to visual art. Aesthetic objects, things of beauty, have always mattered to me.'
The idea for Future Face came out of research she was doing while she was a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington five years ago. Originally she was interested in looking at the effect of digital technology on portraiture, but as she dug further the connections between scientific approaches to the face and artistic ones became more and more apparent. Her research took her into psychology, neurophysiology, forensics and surgery, as well as fine art, and all these areas have contributed to the Future Face exhibition.
It was also out of this research that she set up the Centre for Arts, Research, Technology and Education and an MA in visual culture at the University of Westminster. The idea was to build on the multi-disciplinary connections she had found, allowing students to explore different aspects of visual culture from theoretical and historical perspectives to the role of digital technology.
Having been involved in discussions with the British Museum about its own visual culture centre, she was able to bring it on board as a partner for the MA. She was also able to persuade the National Portrait Gallery to be a partner, as she was doing much of her own research there.
Both institutions now teach modules on the course. Graduates from the MA have become curators at museums and galleries and have gone into academia. Kemp left Westminster in the first year of the MA when the job at the Royal College of Art came up in 2000.
When she first started talking to the Science Museum about doing an exhibition, the museum was interested in one to coincide with the anniversary of the discovery of DNA. She rejected that as she didn't want to do something where art was used to 'exemplify' science.
At the time the Wellcome Trust was planning a series of exhibitions in collaboration with the Science Museum that aimed to promote a 'new dialogue between art and science'. Andrew Nahum, the principle curator of transport technologies at the Science Museum and also on the committee for the Wellcome Wing exhibitions, knew Kemp and her work and suggested she sent a proposal for what became Future Face.
But in spite of the stated aim of the series of exhibitions, Kemp says the hardest part of the project was getting the Wellcome Trust and the Science Museum to see the relationship between art and science in a new way.
'The show could easily have been at the National Portrait Gallery, but part of the point was to stage an exhibition like this in the Science Museum,' she says. 'The hardest thing was getting people in the science world to see that artists are asking equally pressing questions and that the knowledge they gain is as radical and as valuable.
'I wanted to show that artists and scientists were exploring the same questions and are learning from each other. For example, at the moment, perhaps surprisingly, forensic scientists are learning from technological developments in Hollywood.'
Nahum praises Future Face, and says the museum has been interested in the relationship between art and science for some time. 'We appreciate the value of art as a way of knowing, understanding and feeling that is equally as valid as the methods of science,' he says. 'We don't have a crude utilitarian view of science or see it as having primacy over other fields of endeavour.'
Kemp's reference to forensic scientists learning from Hollywood brings up the Science Museum exhibitions on James Bond and Star Wars and whether it has been dumbing down. Kemp believes it is not so much the subject matter as the way the exhibitions are done.
'I did think the Star Wars exhibition was dumbed down, but I didn't see the one on James Bond. The problem with [those kind of exhibitions] is that they are not primarily drawing on the expertise of the resident curators. I think what the museum is doing now, taking its own collections and reviving them, is much more interesting. But as the government directs lottery funding to things it was never set up for, like health and education, there is less and less money for the museum and gallery sector.'
Kemp's own exhibition had a budget of £200,000, which came from the Wellcome Trust. Of that, £60,000 was spent on the build and £40,000 on the design, which was by Morag Myerscough and Hut architects.
It has two interactives, a computer-generated face that seems to 'engage' by locking on to the face of whoever is speaking and a computer programme that 'morphs' visitors faces to show them what they will look like when they are old. There are also two pieces of commissioned art.
She chose and interpreted all the objects herself. In many cases it took a lot of work to get the objects once she had chosen them, particularly the art. 'The question was always the context - why in the Science Museum? I had to really persuade the artists that the art wasn't being used to illustrate and market science.'
She was helped by the fact that she and Myerscough had constructed a 3 foot by 6 foot model of the exhibition and placed every object. This meant she could tell the artists exactly how their piece would relate to the others.
Another point of debate was whether to warn visitors that some of the material could be disturbing. The exhibits include pictures of people before, during and after reconstructive surgery, and the preserved face of a child that had smallpox.
Kemp took advice from a society that represents people with facial disfigurement. Its view, which reflected her own, was that labelling the exhibits as 'disturbing' would help perpetuate the problems the exhibition explores - the fact that people often judge the value of a person by their face - so she settled on a single warning at the entrance of the exhibition.
It was an issue that went to the heart of the exhibition. For in spite of the fact that she wanted it to be beautiful, underlying the show is a message about the dangers of turning aesthetic reactions into value judgements.
'This is a moment when we should be asking moral and ethical questions about face transplants, particularly in an age when we are so used to seeing touched-up faces in magazines that we forget they're not real. I wanted people to think about faces that aren't perfected because of how society regards and treats people without perfect faces.'
