Date completed:
March 2006
Media/tools:
aluminum mesh, Celluclay II, spackle, sponge, Fimo, acrylic paints, fabric dye, water colors, velcro, clear varnish, various fabrics
Images:
(click to view)
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I make a point of avoiding angst in my artwork, mainly because I think there's way too much of that sort of thing out there already, but sometimes it's unavoidable. This mask is one of those exceptions, so if whining and self-pity annoy you, by all means skip this description. Most people have worse, or at least more interesting, problems than I do. This explanation also involves some medical details, so if you are easily squicked by that kind of thing, consider yourself warned.
Still with me? Okay then, here's the deal. Shortly before I entered graduate school in 2001, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease after experiencing a series of high fevers and other puzzling medical problems. (If you are unfamiliar with Crohn's, I encourage you to click here for a good description.) Because the disease is relatively slow-moving, its negative impact on my life has been difficult to grasp; unlike losing a limb or anything similarly sudden and dramatic, the effects of Crohn's creep up on you insidiously, and since there is generally no single point in time at which your health turned bad, it can be hard to remember what life was like in earlier years. It slowly eats away at you, sapping your energy and screwing up your daily life in small but irritating ways, on rare occasion becoming painful enough to require direct medical attention. Did I mention that Crohn's is known to get worse due to emotional stress? It's true. Not a great way to start grad school.
In July of 2004, my symptoms finally worsened to the point where I required major abdominal surgery in order to have a section of my upper and lower intestines removed. I don't think I have ever been in so much pain, or felt so completely helpless, as I did during that time. My recovery tool most of the following year, and in some ways, I will never be able to fully recuperate; to preserve what little modesty I have left on this subject, I'll spare you the reason why. I have been unable to focus on my studies, my relations with friends have been greatly stressed, and I have had very little physical and emotional energy to cope with life in general. I don't think it's being overly melodramatic to state that it feels like a part of my soul has been ripped away.
Finally, I'm getting to the part about how all this relates to the mask. I have been fascinated with selkie mythology ever since I was a kid, and in the summer of 2005, it occurred to me that I had found a certain parallel in the recent events of my life. In the legends, a selkie girl will shed her seal skin to bask on the rocks for a time in human form (in order to, what, get a tan? In Scotland??). If a man should steal her skin, however, she becomes enslaved to him, losing all contact with her former life as a seal, until she can find her skin and return to the ocean. (The male selkies have a much better go of it, apparently. They basically just nance about on land and seduce nubile young women who later give birth to children with webbed fingers, and occasionally they get to overturn fishing boats to protest the slaughter of their kindred. Men rarely get the short end of the stick in these stories.) The notion of losing a critical element of one's self--a part that one hopes desperately to someday regain--resonates very strongly with me at the moment, and this sculpture was made in direct response to that emotion. In folklore, however, the shedding of a selkie's skin is almost a casual affair, and the tragedy lies in the skin's loss. I wanted to illustrate a direct coupling of those two events, and for some reason, the gruesome image of a mutilated seal's skull came instantly to mind.
Most people, I think, would rather be a human than a seal, so one may be hard-pressed to see what's so terrible about being trapped in an alien body forever. I suppose I wanted to make that sense of loss a bit more graphic. Tear away at a seal's skin, and all you will find beneath is bare muscle and bone, not some pretty, submissive young waif. Reality intersecting with fantasy, if you will. You can decide for yourself whether or not the metaphor works.
To those of you who finished reading all that: wow, you have a lot of patience. Thank you for listening.
About the sculpture itself.
I wasn't happy with the initial version of this mask, so I took it apart and rebuilt it. The most obvious difference between this version and its earlier incarnation is the addition of the muscles and dangling bits of gore; the skull on its own didn't seem to convey the right emotion. What really made this work for me, though, was the decision to represent the sealskin as a cloak, instead of attempting to make it look more realistic. There were two concepts that lead to this particular bit of symbolism. The first is that, in the stories, a selkie does treat its skin like a garment. This is quite different from most other shapeshifting creatures of legend, where the process of transformation doesn't involve the (temporary or permanent) loss of a part of oneself. The second concept relates to one of the possible origins of selkie mythology. Much like drunken sailors mistaking manatees for mermaids, there is reason to suspect that kayakers from Lapland may have been mistaken for selkies when seen from a distance. The kayaks were made of animal skins, and their occupants also wore skin garments, which would eventually become waterlogged and need to be dried on land. This may well explain the sightings of discarded sealskins and naked foreigners running about on the islands of Orkney. You can read a full explanation of this theory here.
Just for the record, I don't believe that there are, or ever were, such things as selkies. However, I do believe that the legends illustrate fundamental truths about certain aspects of human nature, and this is what gives power to the myth.
(As an aside: Just how hammered would a sailor have to be to believe that a manatee looked like a beautiful maiden? I mean, have you ever seen a manatee? "Rubenesque" doesn't even begin to describe their physique.) |
