Freaky faces

Yesterday afternoon, I went round to my friend Rozi’s house to ‘borrow’ some of her toddler son’s Baby clothes to make a mini-scarecrow. Clothing for babies has become more fashion conscious in recent years, and new mothers can dress even a newborn baby boy in cute, stylish outfits that closely replicate those of their adult partner. I’m surprised that there are not more scarecrow builds on the Internet that use baby clothes as a basis for making a mini-scarecrow. Maybe this is why?

Here’s the experience of a talented lady called Dawn Isaac, who writes a delightful and informative blog aimed a getting children involved in gardening. It is called ‘Little Green Fingers’, http://littlegreenfingers.typepad.com/little_green_fingers/ In 2009, Dawn had the same idea as I have just had, of building a mini-scarecrow using her children’s cast off baby clothes. Writing of her first attempt, Dawn reports that she had been aiming at ‘cute’ but instead, “I think we've ended up with something that will actually frighten off almost anything.”

The following year, Dawn blogged, “Last year the children and I made a mini-scarecrow which was, quite frankly, one of the ugliest and most disturbing garden ornaments I have ever seen.” She went on to describe it as a ‘malevolent presence’ in the veg patch. Dawn tried again in 2010, but her children’s reaction was no better than the previous year, "That's freaky - it's got no face."

The faces of people we encounter everyday form the visual backdrop to our lives. How we recognise our friends and distinguish them from strangers is one of those things that we tend not to think about, but throughout the course of every single day we rely on our brain's ongoing skill at facial recognition to help us interact socially. Scientists believe that humans process faces differently from other objects. Apparently, our ability to recognise faces is so important to us that the brain has an area called the fusiform gyrus, which is completely dedicated to this one task. However, face recognition is a very complex process, as the recognition of different human emotions like happiness, anger or grief, involves extensive and diverse areas in the brain. Nowadays, our  physical survival rarely depends on our ability to 'read' the information 'written' in people's faces, but correctly interpreting human expressions remains an essential social competence that helps us to communicate and empathise with one another. 

Most of the time, scarecrow-builders do not need to bother too much about whether or not their creation’s face appears freaky, but using baby clothes to dress a mini-scarecrow may mean that greater attention than usual needs to be paid to the character and expression revealed in the scarecrow’s face. Even before I saw Dawn’s blog, I had decided to try scaling up one of my doll making patterns to make a more realistic three-dimensional, needle-sculpted face for my mini-scarecrow. What initially seemed like a short cut to building an attractive and easy scarecrow is now beginning to look like a considerable challenge. Follow this space to see how I get on!