This series is based on the imagery of historical portrait paintings, and the pieces are made using metal cut from flattened-out printed tins such as olive-oil cans and fancy sardine tins. I re-draw and simplify the original image into a series of shapes, then select pieces of tin on the basis of colour and pattern and, using tin snips, cut out the required shape. These shapes are then riveted together to form a new portrait. Collage is the patching together of material to make a whole. It is said that we can read a face like a book, that it holds all of life within its features. Life is made up of a catalogue of events, people and places; the face is the coming together of those parts just as collage is a coming together of fragments. There is something intuitive about constructing a collage, selecting, shaping, and fitting. These works explore the spontaneity of assembling a collage versus the longevity of a face’s features shaped over a lifetime. There is also something interesting about our skill in reading faces, and in how, despite abstraction, we can still discern something as a face.