MORLEY GALLERY

Making Faces

Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship

10 - 26 September 2026

Making Faces brings together new work by Yvadney Davis and Rosie Gibbens, made during the Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship at Morley College. Both artists discovered new techniques and processes that inspired their mixed-media figurative practices. Faces are revealed and concealed, built and deconstructed.

Yvadney creates layered figurative works across painting, intaglio printmaking, and textiles. By exploring questions of the beauty of Caribbean British domestic spaces and the emotional lives of Black women, these works invite viewers to search for visible and invisible inheritances of migration, colonialism, and memory in every face they encounter. Weaving together personal and collective narratives, her practice explores nostalgia, ancestry and belonging, and considers the ways the past continues to shape our identity in the present. Through the faces and figures she depicts, Yvadney invites viewers to consider what is carried across generations - what is remembered, concealed and passed on. These are living archives.

Rosie is interested in the body as a site shaped by systems of labour, technology, and desire. She has focused on learning new skills in sculpture and textiles, using the year to experiment with metalwork, casting, sublimation print, quilting, and drawing. The works present bodies and faces that are fragmented, dissected, and re-assembled using varied techniques. Her own body is often visible, whether through cast facial features, digitally printed ‘skin’, or performances where sculptures are ‘brought to life’. There are repeated references to domestic life: sculptures incorporate robot vacuum cleaner parts or terrazzo ‘counter-top’ style surfaces, while drawings remix kitchen utensils and quilts reference a historically homely medium. This focus on the everyday reflects Rosie’s interest in revealing absurdity within mundane routines - an outlook that has been super-charged since becoming a parent.

Find more information on Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship at Morley College here. Check out our Visual Arts page for more course offerings that range from Jewellery, Glass, Stone Carving, Ceramics, and more.