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The Mask (2006)

Oh dear – the mask.

Two reactions: mine and yours.

Mine: very difficult – alienating, the need to see your features thwarted, it was hard to read you – meaning and intentions; the experience confirms the difficulty of communication when a physical barrier is imposed. Contact and understanding depends on intuitive reading of movement of eyes, mouth and much else that makes up the human face – colour and texture of skin, moisture allows us to see if a person is well, happy, relaxed, angry, tense or anxious. The mask hides not only the face but the soul. Also – you have made a mask that is rather sinister – the slot-like pouting mouth is hard, unfeeling, as you say, robotic, inhuman – in fact, at least emotionally, rather ugly.

You: I fear the mask is possessing you – shielding your emotions, it allows you to express one side of your character, of you soul. Curious, it’s like emotional armour. Knowing the mask protects (or at least hides) your feelings, knowing they can’t be read, it grants you strange powers. Perhaps only the power to be honest. People talk of dropping the mask when they abandon restraint and conventional good manners and speak honestly. In fact raising the mask seems to make freedom of speech and truth easier. Strange, it seems to give emotional strength and courage – but perhaps only because you have to screw up your courage to wear the damn thing each day.

Anciently people wore masks for many reasons – in theatre to express an essential character, whom the actor became; in magic and religious ritual to attract and evoke the powers of elemental beings, animals or natural forces and spirits.

Wearing this mask, do you feel yourself changing – in your dealings with others, with the world? It has certainly made me see you in a different, disturbing light. I didn’t know what was going on, what was your state of mind. I keep thinking of that ugly slot covering your lips and your staring eyes through those two crude orifices. Imagine how different it all would have been if you had made a smiling face. Then I suppose I would think you were constantly happy even if you were not. Imagine shouting angrily at someone while wearing a warm and smiling mask. The angry/sad clown syndrome I suppose. Your senses would be confused – your eyes tell you one thing, your ears another. Or an angry or fierce mask, or a lascivious mask? Of course all of these would have produced different responses in me, also I imagine in you and in all the strangers you pass. But you chose to make a neutral mask – well, not really neutral because its very neutrality is un-neutral, unnatural but alarming. Sinister as I have said.

All very interesting – perhaps more revealing than you realise.

What do you think – and what were you thinking beneath your mask?

Yrs,

Dan