When a gallery asks you to make a body of work to hang next to another artist I find it impossible not to create the new series with the other artist in mind. In this instance, I have been asked to hang beside German photographer Edith Held.

We met briefly last year, I admire Edith and her work. Her name (Edith Held) brought to my mind a long-standing interest I have had in the Hollywood costume designer - Edith Head. Now felt like the right time to make a series of work based around her.

I have also been looking intensely at the archive of Thérèse Le Prat, a recent discovery for me. Again, the connection between Prat’s photography of actors and Edith Held’s work sang out.

The series, entitled ‘Edith’, is based upon the list of films nominated for Oscars (35 in total). I have been researching extensively to find the right crop/composition and expression which only an actor can achieve with a beguiling level of intensity without it seeming overly forced or farcical. I have used only publicity stills or press shots instead of taking stills from the action in the film - this way there is a more profoundly ‘posed’ effect which is what I love in Prat’s work. I have also pushed the cropping more than before - every time I think it’s enough I have pushed a bit further, zooming in - leaving my own comfort zone and concentrating on a deeper look into the expression and textures of their faces.

Therefore the drawings are not a study of Edith Head's costume design but more a look into the famous characters she helped to develop through her inimitable design. That being said, the audience has a nod to Head’s design by way of the pearls which dangle from the frames on slender black chains. There is also a black, mirrored panel at the bottom of the drawing which separates the portrait from the pearls and creates another layer of subtle disturbance.

I have chosen to use cultured ‘Baroque Flame’ pearls for their distance from the ‘ideal’ perfectly round and smooth, naturally occurring pearl. Pearls have come to symbolise a huge plethora both in history and religion and are rife throughout the history of art and fashion. For me, the most interesting metaphor is the notion that something so precious on the outside has been formed by a microscopic irritant entering a mollusc. Their iridescence mirrors that of the inside of the shell in which they were formed. There is so much here to be compared to the life and value of a movie star, often turned into objects of desire far from their origins. In Chinese tradition, a pearl was placed in a dead person’s mouth as protection, the pearls hanging from my drawings offer a symbol of guardianship, fallen grace and ruined finery.

NINA MAE FOWLER, 2023