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!
This solution also contributes to another aspect of the Maskwitches and their masks that I quite like. That being the open question of their "reality." Do they even exist in the same "reality" as we do? What is the nature of their "realness"? Obviously the ordinary people of Doggerland are as real as we are and inhabit a real world bound by the same natural laws and phenomena. Their world also has a reality of Spirits and Maskwitches that ours does not. I like that the exact nature of this second "reality" is left an open question. It could be symbolic and metaphorical. It could be a mass hallucination. It could be a reality as real as the physical reality. It could be something else entirely that I have not thought of.
In that context of not solidly defined "reality" it seems appropriate that the masks should be constructed in part by photoshop collage of real elements. It gives us masks that have the textures and forms of physical objects, but combined in ways that may or may not be possible for a physical object to take form in our world. Somehow this feels "righter" to me than actually crafting prop masks on the workbench.