Anxiety Masks

Anxiety Masks

This body of work has been created during the pandemic. It started in April 2020 and continues through today. They are displayed in the order that they were made. The current body of work called "Anxiety Masks" is mostly comprised of found textiles that I have been collecting through the years. Some masks have paper mache components. With the worsening pandemic and eruptions around race it was hard to be idle. Deep questions such as: "What holds us together?" and "Who are we as individuals and as a country?" combined my usual dark internal dialogue and joined with my love of beauty, set the stage for finding comfort in handmade masks. By covering the entire face, differences such as race, gender and economic status are gone. Each mask simultaneously displays distress and pleasure. It is my intention to create surfaces that capture beauty and humor yet reveal the underlying anxiety of these times. There is almost a humorous quality in the evidence of compulsive process of adornment.