The late artist, curator and scholar Colin Richards (1954–2012) had for many years worked alongside two unidentified human skulls inherited through his position as medical illustrator at the University of the Witwatersrand. Troubled by the ethical lacuna they signalled in the history of medical collections in South Africa and their haunting familiarity in his workspace, they became recurring motifs in Richards’ drawings, paintings and prints. During the curatorial conversations to prepare the exhibition, Between Subject and Object: human remains at the intersection of art and science (2014, Michaelis Galleries, UCT), which Kathryn Smith co-curated with Richards’ former student Josephine Higgins and Penny Siopis – an exhibition which in many ways was designed to honour Richards’ interests and memory – Siopis invited Smith to produce a forensic facial reconstruction of one of the skulls.

Smith produced two facsimiles of the skull: one cast in plastic, which provided the architecture for The Studio Familiar: X0198/1669 (2014), a sculpture that saw the reconstructed bust mounted on a land surveyor’s tripod; and a micro-Computed Tomography scan in collaboration with analytical imaging technicians at Stellenbosch University, after which Siopis documented herself burying the remains in an undisclosed location in her film Lay Bare Beside (2015).

The Phantom Interlocutor (2023) is a digital stop-motion film made from the 2802 individual image slices produced by the micro-CT scanner. From a stack of apparently black and empty jpegs, Smith excavated the image of the skull from each slice through digital manipulation. Extending commonsense notions of personhood, the face is animated by filmic movement – an infinite rotation – rather than the presence of muscle, skin or sensory organs. As a visual mnemonic, it translates the history of the skull with reference to both the spectral and the haptic, like the incision along the top of the cranium as an artefact of autopsy, the etymology of which means ‘to see for oneself’.