There is currently a call for entries open to Uruguayan and international artists to submit our own full mask creations to an exhibition later this year, and I blithely agreed to make one and enter. However, as I don’t think I’ve ever made a mask, this will be something of a learning-by-doing-challenge! I’m currently researching ways to do this, and now I think I should just start – entries close July 10th.

Of course, a mask placed over a face of a living person either renders that person unidentifiable, or, as has been used in theatrical and musical performances since early Greek times, a mask can symbollise a character known to the audience, or its expression can convey to the audience how the performers want /need the onlookers to react to that character. Masks are found in most indigenous society rituals as essential props to the performances through which a non-literate society orally hands down the values and history of their society from one generation to the next.

Something in my mind repeatedly returns to some sinister sueded leather I once bought in a crazy moment – perhaps it needs dripping blood and big sharp teeth ? (what on earth is trying to emerge here?!!! ) Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, declared in the play of the same name, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so?” and when you put on a mask you will be perceived as whatever character you want it to be – goodie or baddie. In a previous post, I showed pics of some of my favourites

A couple of days ago I began some serious researching into how to make masks – I found a couple of demos on YouTube that appealed, and now I can’t find either of them 🙂 but I remember enough to get started and if necessary will improvise as I go along. One was pressing some metallic mesh over my facial contours and attaching all the decoration to that, but I’m wondering if that would that hold its shape really well – the mesh would need to be fairly study. Another one was using a cardboard rectangle and putting notches in it to make ‘tucks’ around the edge, and yes I have cardboard packaging I could use, also plenty of old xrays I salvaged a while ago in a cleanout. In either, I’ll cut eye and nose holes, adding a bit of a flap over the nose one, so now I think I have enough info on how to make one.

The brownish stuff in the photo above is actually a darker grey/light black leather which I can only describe as ‘damaged sueded leather’ since I don’t know how it was produced, and I’m not even sure where it came from. The surface intrigues me and could lead to something rather nasty, of the “Creature from the black lagoon” kind of theme. Over it I’ve draped some of about 3m of a chain of little glittery stars each about 1cm diameter that it seemed a good idea to buy years ago, somewhere… I also have gold lame and plenty of other glittery stuff, including glass beads, so I’ll decide on all this and make a start sometime very soon.

With husband Mike, I visited another marvellous exhibition of about 300 Carnavale masks from the MAPI museum’s huge collection (900) of central and Caribbean masks known as the Claudio Rama Collection of Latin American Masks from across the subcontinent. This exhibition is currently showing in MAPI, the Museo del Arte Pre-Columbino y Indigeno (Museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art) here in Montevideo.

The exhibition takes up the whole floor, flowing from one room to the next, and the masks range from warlike ferocity to highly spiritual (Chistian and indigenous themes) to political-anti colonial statements, and humourous expressions of the natural and especially the animal world – creatures of the air, land and water.

This first group really grabbed my attention, with very clever projections of sinister anger and dark evil in each of them… the teeth and eyes are really something!

Using simpler modelling skills, you might think this next group less “professional” as they also use just simple materials, including an embroidered sock with some scrap fabric, hessian from the garden store, and one recycles a dead tatu’s or armadillo’s capapace. But I really admire their creativity:

These next photos are some of the many wonderful animal masks in the collection :

I might go back to re-visit this exhibition again before it closes in a month or two’s time, as it was almost overwhelming! For my Uruguayan readers and anyone who might be in Montevideo in the next month, I urge you to head down to The Old City soon and see these terrific exhibitions. It’s open six days a week, but on saturdays there’s less traffic in the city, so plenty of parking across the road from the museum, and they have a nice cafe where you can have a coffee or a snack. The museum’s website https://mapi.uy/visita/ details opening hours, entry fees, bus transport and current exhibition information.

There is currently a call for entries open to Uruguayan and international artists to submit our own full mask creations to an exibition later this year, closing date July 10th. I blithely agreed to make one and enter, but as I’ve never made a mask, this will be something of a learning-by-doing-challenge! I’m currently researching ways to do this, and now I think I should just start – entries close July 10th. Something in my mind repeatedly returns to some sinister sueded leather I once bought in a crazy moment – perhaps it needs dripping blood and big sharp teeth – what on earth is trying to emerge here?!!! Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, declared in the play of the same name, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so?”

… to our home in Perth, Western Australia nearly 30 years ago.

I was in Perth at the time, probably packing to come over here to Uruguay, and could tell from the packaging that it was a creation returning from an exhibition, so without opening it I put it in my case and brought it with me. I unpacked it (again without opening), placed it on the bottom shelf in my sewing room, and promptly forgot about it.

Time passed, and we recently installed an elevator between the first and second floors, which on the second floor opens out into my sewing room. I/we had to move a lot of stuff around so the workmen could do their thing, and eventually, with our Easter visitors’ arrival imminent, tidying all that up became urgent. I threw out and donated a satisfying amount of stuff, and in the process came across that Australian Post Office padded mailing bag that I’d brought back from Oz which had been sitting on the bottom shelf for so many years I couldn’t remember what was in it! Here’s a quick peak –

Inside I was astonished to find this artwork I’d completely forgotten making, had never written about or even listed in my catalogue, and have never had professionally photograhed. It’s a concertina-book type of installation, 12 double sided 15cm panels of machine embroidered painted landscapes, and various dwellings from tent to apartment, and the little stands I made to hold them upright. Mixed media in today’s terms. Thank goodness some paperwork inside mentioned the title, “Songlines of The 4WDrovers”, because I doubt I’d think of it again: I am in a totally different mindspace today, and so much water has passed under the bridge. In Australia, a drover is a person, typically an experienced stockman, who moves livestock, usually sheep, cattle, and horses “on the hoof” over long distances. Today, many people (a big percentage of whom are retirees) spend a year or more travelling around Australia in their 4Wheel drive vehicles, most of them camping in tents and caravan parks along the way – and known to most as the Grey Nomads; and songlines are the orally handed down verbal maps by which Aboriginal people know their way from one part of the country to another.

So, when I take my latest art quilt (tapiz) to my photographer Eduardo in a couple of weeks’ time, I’ll have him shoot 4WDrovers, too… and that, dear reader, will soon be the subject a new post here!

The week before Easter, known around the Christian world as Holy Week, is known in Uruguay as Semana Tourismo. Mike and I enjoyed several days’ visit from a very dear friend Dennis, who we’ve known for about 60 years, and his friend, Anne, whom we’d not met before, but took and instant liking to. The weather was perfect, and we had a lot of fun catching up and getting to know Anne, who hadn’t visited South America before, while visiting some favourite places, consuming considerable quantities of Uruguayan wine and meat, and I was impressed that everyone managed to not overdo it on any occasion – and we also drank a lot of tea. Not surprisingly I didn’t do a stitch on my current work, and as I expected, after they left I turned back to it with fresh eyes.

This one is in a series of motifs sitting on distorted grids representing instability in the world around us, which I had tentatively named the Rules Based Disorder. While entering one of them into a call just before Easter, with two weeks of worldwide tarriff-induced chaos already behind us, adding to shipping chaos and talk of canals, security and so on, I suddenly hit on a better, perfect, title, for this series – “Out Of Order”, and I wrote the following statement: For many decades, the concept of rules-based order underpinned our personal, community, national and international networks.  In today’s world, however, familial, social, trading and other networks are under social, political, financial, technological and climate change pressures, and some of those systems are now failing, they’re out of order.

I hadn’t quite finished quilting the gold painted squares before our visitors arrived, and was very aware that I still felt a lack of committment to anything for the infill quilting that I knew I’d have to decide on and do to finish this work. The black background needed to be flattened down a bit. Machine quilting in black looked really wrong, out of place, and I had absolutely no appetite for hand quilting in black on black (what I did around each square was quite enough of that!) and machine quilting in any colour would be wrong considering the hand quilted squares.

Why didn’t I just layer it all after printing the gold squares, and then do some quilting in cream/white stitching on those squares? Well that would have depressed the squares giving the opposite effect to what I wanted – which was something suggesting embossing… so to quilt inside those units would have defeated that goal.

These motifs above were stitched in the cream I’d stitched on the gold squares – but it was too bright and overwhelming. The square motif was right (upper right), because it relates to the pattern on the squares, but the thread colour’s wrong. However, I have some fine pale gold thread, which looks just right – visible and toning with the gold squares, while fine enough to definitely lurk quietly in the background.

These auditions of thread and motif including evaluation time, all took several hours over the weekend, but now that I’ve found the right combination, I can just get on with it over the next few days, and I’ll easily have it ready for the photography date I’ve already booked. These days I do my best to plan ahead a bit, to avoid the stress of a last minute rush to some entry deadline; and allowing plenty of time for the photography is part of that planning!