Through the contrasting practices of Yvadney Davis and Rosie Gibbens, Making Faces at Morley Gallery, London unsettles the face as a stable marker of identity, revealing the body instead as a site where memory, inheritance, labour and lived experience are continually constructed and reconfigured.
By Ayọ̀ Akínwándé
1 October 2026
There are exhibitions where two artists share a room, and there are exhibitions where two practices begin to speak to each other. Making Faces belongs to the latter. Yvadney Davis and Rosie Gibbens come to the body from different positions and through different materials, yet the exhibition at Morley Gallery feels remarkably complete. Painting, printmaking, textiles, drawing, sculpture, installation, video and performance move through the space without becoming a catalogue of techniques. Instead, one work begins to answer another. A bead becomes a tear. A thread becomes a line. A face becomes a mask. A body is dressed, dissected, concealed, exposed and put back together again.
The exhibition brings together work made during the 2026 Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship at Morley College. Its title, Making Faces, is deceptively simple. Faces are everywhere, but they are rarely stable. Davis builds them through paint, wallpaper, print, fabric and beads; Gibbens pulls them apart, casts them, turns them into sculptural objects and extends the same logic into the rest of the body. Their practices remain distinct, but the exhibition repeatedly allows one material or gesture to find an echo in the other.
Davis gives the exhibition one of its clearest emotional and material languages. In Daylight Come, beads fall across and beyond the blue painted surface, extending the image into the viewer’s space. They can be read as tears, but they are also ornament: coloured, weighted and deliberately composed. That doubleness matters throughout Davis’s work. Pain is present, but it does not monopolise the image. Colour, dress, pattern and beauty remain equally visible.
Gibbens answers the face differently. In Faces 1–8, red, pink and white forms hang on the wall with threads, rope and elongated structures dropping beneath them. There is something immediately relatable about them: at moments they resemble emojis or children’s drawings, yet the longer one looks, the stranger their anatomy becomes. Noses protrude, mouths open, eyes detach, and threads descend like nerves, tears or spines. The works are humorous and bodily at once. Davis’s beads and Gibbens’s cords do not mean the same thing, but placed within the same exhibition they begin to rhyme.
The act of looking is already staged in The Butters Big Reveal. The lace curtain and wooden pole turn the painting into a domestic threshold and a small stage. The viewer encounters not only an image, but the conditions through which that image is disclosed. That concern with revelation becomes more intimate in the next work.
In Vexation Underneath, concealment becomes physical. A seated figure is covered by a voile curtain, and the viewer can lift the material to reveal the portrait beneath. Seen in its two states, the work makes looking into an action. The veil does not simply hide an image; it changes the terms on which the figure becomes available to us. The work holds revelation and withholding together rather than resolving one into the other.
Gibbens’s drawings perform a related act on anatomy itself. The figures twist, hang, connect and separate. They are anatomical without pretending to be anatomically correct. Looking at them, I thought about Leonardo’s anatomical studies, not because Gibbens draws like Leonardo, but because of the impulse to take the body apart in order to look at it again. Some forms resemble skeletons or objects under medical examination. Limbs become tubes, organs become shapes, and bodies become structures that can be dismantled, entangled and remade. The sparseness of coloured pencil on paper gives these strange mechanics room to breathe.
Domestic intimacy takes a different form in Davis’s Daddy Issues. A woman reclines with her head on her husband’s lap. One hand covers her face and a strand of beads drops from it; from the second hand, another strand falls towards the floor. The beads therefore emerge from both hands, making the gesture of concealment inseparable from the material fall of the work. I read the partner and the home as a place of refuge, a space where the body might stop performing strength.
The painting also recalled Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s domestic portraits of herself and her husband, particularly Nwantinti (2012) and Re-branding My Love (2011). I am not suggesting influence. The connection, for me, is a visual and historical resonance: domestic intimacy, partnership and the private life of a Black woman become serious pictorial subjects. Home is not merely background. It can hold rest, love, vulnerability and the meeting of public and private selves.
Performance art can sometimes feel redundant, even cheesy. It can leave you asking: what exactly is the point of this? In some ways, performance has acquired a problem similar to photography: owning a camera and taking a photograph does not necessarily make one a photographer, just as placing the body before an audience and moving through a space does not automatically make the resulting action compelling performance. What makes Gibbens’s To Dust: A Memorial for Robot Vacuum Cleaners compelling for me is the way the performance extends from, and eventually returns to, sculpture. The 2-minute-51-second video shown in Making Faces documents a performance presented during Riga Art Week in 2026. Moving through the spiral staircase and surrounding architecture, the performers sometimes appear to inhabit the theatrical space of a music video; at other moments, the presence of the live audience returns us to the reality of performance. The white clothing, gloves and masks give the scene a clinical quality, but also a sense of ritual.
What completes the work for me is encountering the three death masks again in the gallery, installed as sculptures beside the video. Each carries a different facial gesture. They are not merely props left over from a performance. They move between states: sculptures produced by Gibbens, activated by bodies in the performance, recorded through video, and returned to the exhibition as objects bearing the residue of that activation. The performance becomes an extension of the sculpture, while the sculptures return to the gallery changed by what has happened to them.
Davis returns us from speculative anatomy to the social and emotional body. In Sorrow, SE22, the London postcode fixes the title to a particular geography while the beads make emotion material. They descend from the eyes, travel across the painted figure and continue beyond the lower edge of the canvas. The tears are visible, but they are also ornament. Wallpaper, clothing, hair, colour and pattern do not retreat before sorrow; they remain insistently present. This is why I resist reading Davis’s paintings as a linear journey from pain to joy. Pain and joy occupy the same surface. Neither cancels the other.
There is also an intergenerational history behind Davis’s insistence on self-fashioning. She spoke of a mother whose own possibilities had been constrained, and who was determined that her daughter would have freedoms she had been denied. Davis recalls the sentiment surrounding her birth almost as a declaration: this child would be allowed to become whatever she wished. When Davis later chose fashion, her mother encouraged her to pursue it. Freedom itself has a genealogy: what one generation was denied, another was deliberately given permission to pursue.
In Picky Plantation, that material language shifts again. The long strands can read as tears, but also as exaggerated jewellery, extending the figure beyond the painted support. The Afro, floral dress and wallpaper create a highly ornamented field in which vulnerability and self-presentation coexist. The beads do not simply illustrate sadness; they complicate how the face is read.
That attention to surface finds another register in Gibbens’s textile works. I was drawn to their simplicity and to the way black moves into brown while red and pink are broken by other colours and shapes. Some passages feel almost botanical. The body is not represented directly, yet skin, covering, touch and pattern
remain close to the surface. Where Davis uses wallpaper and dress to build the social world around a figure, Gibbens allows pattern itself to become bodily.
The Untitled Hurricane works produce another kind of looking. Portrait heads appear in changing colours, surrounded or interrupted by beads, shells and lines that extend into the white paper. Installed together, they felt almost investigative to me, as if one were trying to locate characters and trace relationships between them. The material additions pull the portraits towards sea, island, migration and memory without reducing them to illustrations of those subjects.
During Davis’s conversation with Dr Zoé Whitley on 19 September, they spoke about pain and trauma across Black women’s lives and about the expectation that women simply manage it. Whitley brought with her Nikki Giovanni’s A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter, a book whose title felt particularly resonant in a room surrounded by Davis’s recurring tears. Their conversation returned repeatedly to crying: to allowing oneself to cry, to grief and release, and to what it means for tears to become visible rather than something that must be contained. What interested me was not the possibility that ornament converts pain neatly into joy. It is that ornament allows pain and joy to remain visible at the same time.
Davis’s more domestic installation gathers chairs, textiles, family images, beads and references to Grenada into something closer to a living space than a conventional display. The archive is not held at a distance. It becomes furniture, decoration, memory and atmosphere. Home is constructed through what is kept around us.
There is also an unexpected Royal College of Art connection running through this exhibition. Gibbens completed the MA Contemporary Art Practice at the RCA in 2018, while Davis is currently undertaking an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the same institution. That shared institutional thread sits quietly behind Making Faces. It does not collapse their practices into one lineage, but it adds another point of contact between two artists already meeting through material, the body and the movement between media.
This is where the curating of Making Faces succeeds. Davis and Gibbens do not need to make the same work for their practices to meet. Davis’s beads find an unexpected counterpart in Gibbens’s threads and cords. Davis’s tears answer Gibbens’s dangling eyes and bodily extensions. Faces appear as portraits in one practice and as masks or constructed objects in the other. Domesticity appears as family memory and refuge for Davis, and as appliances, labour and absurd routine for Gibbens. Both artists make the body carry more than itself.
The exhibition is very complete. I love its use of form and colour, its figures, its engagement with the viewer and the way the works have been brought together. Two women working across different areas of practice meet through painting, printmaking, textiles, performance, installation, video, sculpture and drawing. They
find commonality without being made identical. Their work speaks to what it means to be a woman and what it means to examine the body, while leaving room for very different experiences of those questions. Perhaps this is why The Anatomy of a Tear feels like the right way for me to think about the exhibition. The tear is singular, but it does not have one meaning. In Davis’s work, it can be pain, release, ornament and something one is finally permitted to show. Anatomy belongs immediately to Gibbens’s fragmented, flexible bodies, but it also describes the exhibition’s larger act of looking closely: at what a face carries, at what a body remembers, at what domestic space can hold.
Making Faces does not ask pain to become joy. It lets us see the pain. It lets us see the joy. It lets both remain visible. That refusal of a neat transition is one of the exhibition’s strengths. So is its refusal to flatten two artists into a single story. Their practices touch, separate and meet again. In those points of contact, the exhibition finds its power.
Making Faces: Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship is on exhibition at the Morley Gallery, London, from 10–26 September 2026.
Ayọ̀ Akínwándé is a British-Nigerian artist working across painting, lens-based media, installation, sound, and performance. His work examines power, socio-political realities, and the interplay of tradition and modernity. He is also a curator, researcher, and writer, with international exhibitions and curatorial projects, including co-curating the inaugural Lagos Biennial (2017).
