What is this exhibition about?

Striking Impressions aims to challenge prejudice by showing how people have interpreted and depicted the human face in different times and cultures.

We often judge people based on their appearance, even though we know little about them. Racist and ableist pseudo-sciences are now dismissed, but ongoing psychological research shows that we still make prejudiced judgements in response to faces. The section Reading the face explores the psychology of how we respond to faces and historical theories about what a person's face indicates about them.

The way we respond to faces is exploited by artists when they depict the face. Making faces focuses on how in almost any depiction of the face there is distortion, from monstrous 'grotesques' to idealised portraits. This is most obvious in the art of caricature, covered in Mocking faces, where a person's face is exagerrated to suggest something about their character or simply for comic effect.

See how easy it is to assume you know more about someone else than you actually do, and look out for prompts to try different ways of drawing faces.

Striking Impressions was curated by the University Collections team in collaboration with Dr Helen Pierce and Dr Clare Sutherland.