MASK

I enjoyed this project a lot mainly because I like working with my hands. I loved moulding and sculpting, and colouring the mask. I have never made a mask before and it was very interesting to learn about the process.

The process itself was easy but time consuming. I had to mould a lot of parts, cover them in vaseline and the wrap them in plaster sheets, which I had to drench in water first. The process is very messy; my hands were covered in plater and vaseline. The layers of plater and vaseline were building up which  made it difficult to be precise with my sculpting.

The meaning behind the mask is quite simple. Like majority of my art, it is focused on mental health and struggles I go through on daily basis. This mask represents the demons I am battling with everyday. My mask is not perfect looking on purpose, because I wanted it to look like it has character. My mask is also has a little smile which represents that he is always winning over me. My eyes has no holes for eyes which symbolises the idea that sometimes I am blind and I can’t see the issue, therefore I cannot fix it.

Some difficulties I had:

  • I have made more pieces and then ended up not using them because the plater sheets made the initial size of the sculpted piece increase, therefore there was no space nor did I think it would look aesthetically pleasing.
  • It was really difficult to dig out the clay out of the cold regardless of the fact that I have put a lot of vaseline in between the layers.
  • My paint was not layering properly, so I had to paint about 10 or so layers.
  • The initial glue that I bought was not working at all. I have spent 20 minutes glueing one horn. Then I gave up and bought E6000 glue, which did work, but again, I had to hold the horns for about twenty minutes and then I left them resting on the water bottle for extra support.

Regardless of all the challenges, I really enjoyed this project!

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