“There might or might not be someone who “knew how” to make [....] roughly a synonym for “known to have done so.”

• Margaret Mead, Technique and Personality, 1963

Masks interest me because of how much information faces carry and that, regardless of their form or design, a mask will always read as a face. Selfishly, I appreciate the relative ambivalence to authorship and signature that comes with scholarship on art deemed “primitive.”

I love that masks could be decorative and performative. Masks are sculptures in which decoration, performance, and ritual only seem to enrich one another in association. How gratifying would it be to take a mask off the wall and, with it, tell the tale of a faraway place? 

If you want, I’ll tell you about the fantasies I write about in my spare time; these masks could be the faces of those characters. Another planet, for example, that people from a future Earth attempt an exodus to. A failsafe world where we can plant our roots after our own is left uninhabitable. The people who traveled to the failsafe planet and those who were there when they arrived. What these people look like, and what the characters come to symbolize in the context of a greater narrative.

 These masks aren’t really about those stories, though. They are primal expressions—or something… a mental hurdle I finally jumped. I excavated these faces from wood—something I’d looked forward to immensely. The stories are up to you.