Radient: Smile Lines

So much of the popular culture and the giants of the beauty industry tell us to hide our wrinkles.  From Botox to ‘anti-ageing face creams’ we are told that we should hide what it is that gives us character. But what is we don’t? What happens when we take on the aspects of us that makes us our selves.

Wrinkles are literal road maps of our lives. The trails, the tribulations, the growth and the triumphs. Ones wrinkles are physical documentation of progression, not something to be feared. 

Life is a linear path, in the way of that path there are ups and downs, all of which need to be overcome. The game of life is a long one. People come into your life and leave. The person that you are at this point in not the person that you are going to be in a year’s time, two years’ time, ten years’ time. 

To imagine yourself at a point where wrinkles area part of yourself is something that many of us can’t perceive. If only a moment could last for ever.  However, it is as time moves forward, we are able to look back with retrospect. To do that requires perspective, it requires experience.  

‘Wrinkles’ by JR tells the pictorial story of the wrinkle. Who is the person being the soft skin and wrinkled face, where have the wrinkles come from and what sort have life have, they lived? These are the stories that aren’t told, deemed insignificant by the time one gets to this stage in life. ‘Wrinkles’ subverts that concept, humanising the subjects and in turn giving them a voice.

It’s time that we as a society familiarise ourselves with our elders. In a time of fast living we need to cognise what came before. There proverbial railroads of time are long and winding and allow us to progress forward. Take time to appreciate the reality of time; wrinkles are a marker of life lived and not of life coming to an end. 

To acquire JR’s debut children’s book: ‘Wrinkles’ is available to purchase. 

Wrinkles, written by JR, published by Phaidon, £12.95 (phaidon)