With an ongoing interests in the Mask. (see 2018 Masks Projects)
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In the big city we like to wear our facemasks whilst walking around and on our daily commute. Our facemarks protect us from unwanted attention and connection. In Glitch of The Tube, I notice that the grotesque facemarks are not far from those characters of the Hieronymous Boshe, Heaven and Hell painting.
This video highlights that the animate and inanimate are closely related and yet the shift between one and the other has significant psychological effects. I have called the Renodnol Mask the Polk-a'after reading about the psychological effects of suppressing your facial expressions which increased the inanimate mask like quality of the face. See Essay for more details.
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Ineed, I am interested in how masks hide, disguise and transform an identity. increasingly I am interested in masks as a form or 'role we play'.
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Earlier on in the year gave a talk in class about gender as form of mask.
The mask as subject for me is a got a tool or conceptual frame in which to talk about or consider or aspects of work and life.
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Masks provide a rich starting point for conversation with interdisciplinary researchers. This year I have spoken with Integrative arts therapists, actors, craftspeople, psychologists, performers and anthropologists. Their archetypal status makes them easy to idenitify and spot across cultures even if they are used in different ways.
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Considering the mask as a framework you can enter into discussions about performativity, boundaries, identity, culture, and more. Within my work I have brought combined my research focus and personal interests using ethnographic methods. I have touched on all these elements during the exhibition using both research into the pschological aspect of the mask and using the masks in improvisational performance and in the photographs used for the ethnographic style photos for the display posters. In these photographs, I am naked and I am referencing the way in which other cultures have been captured in ethnographic photographs and documentaries.
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