Souls of the Road

Like many people, I’ve always seen faces or animal shapes in clouds. But during the Covid lockdown in 2021, I suddenly saw an image of a face and partial body in the dirt and broken concrete fire road I’ve walked on a hundred times. Big Man was the first face I identified, a mythic priestlike character, then Chopin, a woman with curls piled on her head like a 1600s French wig, then Wizard and Broken Nose. Soon the faces were everywhere. I learned this tendency to see faces in random patterns or inanimate objects is called pareidolia. I loved this discovery in the dirt and was brought back to my archaeology roots of finding pieces of past civilizations in the earth. To define the faces and make them more visible I sewed on my photographs, following the lines of the faces with machine embroidery, creating two images, the face on the front and the sewed outline on the back of the piece. My collection of these Souls of the Road is an ongoing project.