Masks!

The biggest hurdle?

One of the biggest challenges in making the redux edition of Maskwitches has been the masks themselves. I know I can make some life-size tools and amulets, I knew I could use dressed figures, rightly or wrongly - the effectiveness of all that is up to the viewer.

But masks? That was a tough one. Maskwitches’ masks have certain features, for no reason other than I feel they’re right. But it’s important to me, and things I feel about the setting:

• Masks have hair which makes them quite human, in a hard to explain way
• Masks sometimes/often have weird eyes which casts some doubt on if they’re actually a mask
• Masks have “antlers” made of branching sticks, plants and bones.
• They’re weird and frightening in their oddness which casts some doubt on whether the Maskwitches are “good guys” by our modern estimation - which is something to do with their power. Again more feelings than facts, but this is sometimes how this project works. It has its own logic.
• They’re often composites of various materials

Now, with those things in mind a problem arises. If I made them full size the workload would be phenomenal. The making of them would be very demanding because they’d need to look really good, and 1:1 scale would need enormous amounts of raw material. It would also present a bunch of practical problems like what would I make them from, and where would I store them?

And if I made them small then things like hair and antlers becomes challenging to get right. So I put masks to one side, and concentrated on figures, landscapes, amulets and tools, in the hope that eventually some solutions would present themselves.

And they did. Which was a relief! Working with the little figures built a language, and a way of thinking laterally, which worked for those small models, and pushed me in the right direction. I was able to take photos of a bunch of raw materials and then build masks from those in photoshop, side-stepping the scale issue.

This was the first one I made:

Which was based on this chunk of rotten roots I found when out walking.

I then shot a whole bunch of “stuff” to collage together. I feel that I managed to also take some quite nice photos of my skull collection! Setting up the lights and shooting from a tripod is worth it.

Armed then with a collection of photos to work with, and the ability to experiment and shoot more of what was needed, I got to work. I’ll keep some masks for the book, but here’s the very latest batch:

I’m very happy with this approach as a solution to the issues with making masks!