Why I Make Masks

Sans Souci Studios, Barre, VT.

Welcome to the online home of Sans Souci Studios! Pronounce it "sans soo-see", not "sans sushi" and especially not "sans sucky". It's French, it means "without worry", and I tell people it's supposed to bring to mind  the carefree fun a person can have wearing a mask, but truthfully it's a total geekout  and the name of one of my favorite role playing characters, who was definitely not "without worry."

I am often asked "why do you make masks", and in the context of polite small talk in which this question usually arises, I reply that I think it's fun and I've  been doing it since I was a kid. But since this is an artist's statement and not polite small talk, I'll tell the longer version of the tale here.

The residents of Sans Souci Studios: myself, my daughter Isabelle, and my husband Brian.

My daughter at the 2010 All Species Day in Montpelier, VT. This mask is similar to the folded cardboard masks I made in elementary school.

 

When I was a kid, I thought it was boring to have to be human all the time. I wanted to see in the dark, follow a scent in the woods, run for days without tiring. I could do these things in the stories I wrote and the pictures I drew. I invented a cast of characters- "Tricky" the fox, "Trouble" the wolf, "Brono" the horse- to keep me company on my adventures. In fourth grade I found a book that showed how to make masks from folded colored cardboard. I was enthralled. I could become Tricky! The adults around me were by turns impressed with my creativity and alarmed I might grow up unable to tell reality from fantasy.

During college I double majored in art and psychology and wanted to make masks as part of my senior project. However, in those dark days before Internet-powered research, my knowledge of maskmaking techniques and materials went only a teeny bit further than cardboard, newspaper strips and wheat glue, and my professor rather strongly encouraged me to find something else to do. I forayed more into conceptual art (the high? point of which was making a sculpture of plastic tampon applicators that had washed up on Boston's North Beach) and then into landscape painting, but I felt something was missing. Most of my mind roamed in the stratosphere while a small part of it remained behind to diddle with the paint and the brushes. Eventually I came to the conclusion that "high art", in the quest for the artist's individual voice and unique contribution to art history, is in danger of compartmentalizing and shrinking itself to the point of the irrelevant and the absurd. ("Using only cardboard and duct tape, Artist X explores the convergence of Ska music and Indonesian imports and its influence on lunch room conversations at Pratt and Whitney.") When in the late 90's I rediscovered mask making, it was like a bolt from a clear blue sky.

 Mask making does not compartmentalize, it connects. It's not just sculpture or painting, it's both. It connects visual art with literary and theatrical art. It connects the arts in general with history, anthropology, and religion. Where before I found myself caught in a tiny space, I now found myself with limitless realms for exploration.

Masks also bridge the realms of the real and the fantastic, portraying as they have gods, demons, monsters, etc, beings that are harder to portray by more conventional means. This tinge of the fantastic is my favorite thing about masks. Perhaps in this culture, with its almost religious belief in growth and progress, the fantastic is seen as irrelevant, childish, or even pathological, a meaningless relic from an earlier time. I myself have always adored the fantastic, and feel it is an essential part of life.

The fantastic invites us to play.

I want my masks to be played with! I want someone to put on my mask and imagine, perhaps, that they're some large creature running through the woods, the scent of frost and dry leaves in their noses. I want them to step outside of themselves for just a moment and perhaps come back recharged and refreshed. For this reason I make my masks to be completely wearable. This means I face endless technical challenges that artists who make merely decorative masks don't face (how do you make a large mask comfortable, nearly unbreakable, and under a pound in weight?) but I can't imagine doing it any other way.

The first masks I made after returning to the craft in the 1990's. Our roleplaying group venturing out for Halloween dressed as our "Werewolf The Apocalypse" characters. That's me front and center, as "Adrienne Saint Cyr".

The fantastic takes us out of the realm of the ordinary, the expected. It keeps us off balance. It can help us to see in new ways.

I make masks for adults, not children. Adults are more in danger than children are of 'going through the motions' and not even *seeing* what's in front of them. Adults (it goes without saying) have so much more *experience* than children do that they are more likely to make sense of it by using a kind of shorthand, sticking it in boxes such as gender, race, occupation, political affiliation, religious denomination and so on and so forth. The boxes can make all that experience more manageable but they can also disguise it, distort it, hide it from view. The fantastic takes all the boxes and shuffles them around, tips them upside down. The fantastic offers a new perspective, a fresh vantage point. And no fresher vantage point than the inside of a mask!

The fantastic leads us into the realms of mystery, the unknown.

The fantastic, and masks with it, have helped us ask questions on a truly grand scale. What is the nature of good and evil? How to keep balance between order and chaos? What happens after death, at the end of the world? Masks, portraying as they have gods, demons and other creatures, have helped tell the stories that ask these questions for centuries. It bothers me when people assume that these stories, being as often as they are from non-modern times, are at best quaint and at worst irrelevant, and the masks by extension 'primitive' and therefore coarsely made. I think about how Congolese mask makers used to sell their poorest efforts to Western traders who didn't know any better and kept the best masks for themselves, and I believe that the equation of 'primitive' with 'coarse' doesn't reflect truth so much as it reflects modern Western beliefs about much of the rest of the world. Therefore, I will not make coarse masks. In respect for the fact that masks were often considered homes to gods and spirits, I feel compelled to make masks with every ounce of skill I have.

The fantastic evokes feelings of wonder and awe. In this day and age of almost religious belief in growth and progress, we need wonder and awe to help keep the balance. It is my sincere hope that in its own small way, my art will help keep the fantastic alive.