I’ve very pleased to say that I’ll be exhibition my work in the Crate gallery in Margate. Please come if you are in the area. I will be posting images and video from the set up and open days on Instagram @miriamcomber.
“Our Messy Emotions vs Automated Empathy” will a free exhibition at Crate from 7th to 9th June 2025.
Open :7th June 4pm to 7pm, 8th and 9th June 11am to 4pm.
Location: Crate, 1 Bilton Square, High Street, Margate, CT9, 1EEFor more information, please visit cratespace.co.uk
Jessa Fairbrother is an artist working with embroidery on self-portraits. Her work is exceptional, very beautiful, very delicate and very emotional. I strongly recommend you have a look at her website and Instagram @jessfairbrother.
While her work is a world away from mine, I felt we have common ground in stitching meaning into photographs. Jessa runs workshops in her studio in Bristol and we organised a day that would be part portfolio review and part workshop.
It was great to do a portfolio review face to face. I brought all my embroidered images, pinned on foam board, with a selection of glass beads, so I could re-create the total effect, and A5 prints of the final images. Jessa put together groups of images that worked well together. I’m always interested in people’s view on this because I think I get blind to the images after working on them so long. For example, one of the things that never occurred to me was that the shoulders should be in about the same place in sets, so they look good together.
We also discussed developing the work. One thing that we tried was using just one type of glass on several images. I include glass to refer to the internet, but it’s a stretch for viewers to make and keeping the expression of that idea constant could help.
The conversation about the images always came back to the ‘why’ being the project. What am I trying to say, why am I making these choices and, of course, why does it matter? This informed a conversation about what the final image is and the difference between a unique image, which Fairbrother makes, and a collage, which is what I make. I’d not thought about the images being collages.
Jessa is an expert needlewoman and, although I’ve some experience with stitching, she was able to help me get a better understanding of the technicalities of sewing on photographic paper – the best paper, thread and needles to use and how to start and finish off. I found I had a lot to learn. For example, while I use good quality paper, I’ve used any old adhesive (to stick on beads) and tape (to keep tension the thread) . I now understand that I need to think about using materials that are acid free and won’t rust even if the work is not going to be the final image.
An added bonus was seeing Jessa’s work and her talking me through the techniques and the thoughts and inspirations behind each. The work stretched back to a piece from her early work “Conversations with my mother” made after her mother had died and she found that she could not have children herself. Across a number of works she explained how she uses thread and perforations of the image not just as decoration but as metaphor for attachment, absence and more. Her work is highly decorated, but I’d not understood until I saw the actual objects that the stitches are very small and delicate. The stitches used not complex, but the patterns are intricate and interesting. Of course, one of the key points of doing this kind of work is that there is a sort of jeopardy – mistakes cannot really be corrected.
This was a really useful and enjoyable day. I got:
Beyond all this our conversation gave me a really interesting and useful insight into what an artistic practice means and the context of the art industry. As well as a font of knowledge, Jessa is a lovely person to meet.
I’ve very pleased to say that I’ll be exhibition my work in the Crate gallery in Margate. Please come if you are in the area. I will be posting images and video from the set up and open days on Instagram @miriamcomber.
“Our Messy Emotions vs Automated Empathy” will a free exhibition at Crate from 7th to 9th June 2025.
Open :7th June 4pm to 7pm, 8th and 9th June 11am to 4pm.
Location: Crate, 1 Bilton Square, High Street, Margate, CT9, 1EEFor more information, please visit cratespace.co.uk
You probably know that AI can be used to identify our faces. It is also used identify emotions, based on our facial expressions. This is even more problematic. The Emotion AI (EAI) models tend to assume that we all experience the same limited range of emotions – rather like the idea of five emotions in Disney’s Inside Out – and express them in more or less the same way.
Our emotions are more complex than this. and we express them in different ways depending on context – we have different smiles when we’re happy and when we’re being polite; we cry about sad events and sad films. But we know and understand these differences.
EAI is flawed and simplistic, yet it is offered as solution to, for example, choosing suitable candidates for jobs, measuring the engagement of students and measuring customer satisfaction.
This series expresses my scepticism that EAI can clearly read and understand emotion and my resistance to its intrusion. I want to reject the possibility that what we feel can, and will, be categorised by EAI; that a program might catch my expression and decide I need to cheer up, calm down or would like to buy something.
Each self-portrait shows me expressing an emotion. I take a B&W print of the portrait and add embroidery and other stitching to hide that emotion. I also add pins and linking threads making a ‘net’ to mimic how Emotion AI might take a reading from the face. I use stitching so that the solution to being decoded is based on craft, which is more a more human approach than tech.grounded in handiwork and tradition, and so a more. Finally, the addition of glass is about the way we are seen and see ourselves – through the screens, lenses and optic fibres of the Internet.
We are living in a culture of digital surveillance. This is not something that is imposed on us. In fact we are active or passive participants.
We are immersed in surveillance through the networked devices that have become an essential part of our everyday life. Every interaction with these devices produces data – what we type, what we like, what we look at and for how long. This data is why we don’t pay for the internet in money. Instead, we give tech companies this data for free and they run algorithms so they can use the data to make money. We know that what we search for, like or share will shape what we are shown and assumptions about what we want to buy. Everything is data. Where we go, how we get there and how long it takes us is played back to us in digital maps. What we buy, cook, eat and when is all data. Even our health, from our step count, or the timing of our periods to doctors’ records, is data.
Photography contributes to the mass of data captured. Our face is scanned to identify us at airports, but also buy our phones and laptops. Smart devices like doorbells, cars and vacuum cleaners collect video. Our image, particularly that of our face, can be thought of as a special kind of data. It not only represents our identity but also provides a window to our inner state, a window that can be used to classify, and potentially commoditise, our emotions.
Emotion need no longer be a human sense of vague, indefinable “feelings,” instead emotion is in the process of becoming a “legible,” standardized commodity (Scott 1999) that can be sold, managed, and altered to suit the needs of those in power.
Sivek (2018) p2
Sivek, S. C. (2018) ‘Ubiquitous Emotion Analytics and How We Feel Today’ In: Daubs, M. S. and Manzerolle, V. R. (eds.) Mobile and ubiquitous media: Critical and international perspectives,. New York: Peter Lang. pp.287–301.
Miriam Comber 