Behind the Mask

Behind the Mask

For a while now I have been working on a large sculpture called behind the mask and have been showing its progress from start to finish on Facebook and twitter. Now its nearing compleation a friend of mine had written some words about the piece and I thought they would be great to share with you on our blog.

 

Augustinas Našlėnas

 

A human being is a compilation of masks. We change them as we go through life. Year by year, day by day, hour-by-hour we acquire new and discard the old ones. Life demands us to be good sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, good students, good employees, parents, teachers, etc etc. A never ending flow of shifting guises which most of us put on and drop as required without questioning. That is the reality of living in a society.

But what if we stop for a minute and ask ourselves ‘Who am I really?’. Who is the ‘I’ that asks this question? This eternal conundrum is precisely what my friend sculptor Andrew Vickers is looking an answer for in his latest stonework entitled Behind The Mask.

A large piece of stone has been skillfully transformed into a human face – The Mask (perhaps a self-portrait of the author). It is suspended on a metal frame, which allows the viewer to spin it around, revealing the other side – the ‘dark’ side – of the face. And what do we see here? A bewildering flux of shapes emerges from the stone. We see animals: a hare, a raven, a snake, a lion, even a dragon. We also see anthropomorphic forms: a long haired Mermaid, a Native American warrior with a feather bonnet, which, viewing from a different angle, might look like a horned Viking helmet. All these shapes are fluidly merging with each other, as if caught in a bubbling process of becoming. Andrew is giving us a dream-like vision of a consciousness in motion, where psychic archetypes emerge, shift, blend and separate constantly. A dream set in stone.

So who is this ‘I’ who hides behind the mask? ‘I don’t know’, said Andrew, ‘I don’t know, because I am forever becoming.’

 

 

Augustinas is a great artist and I urge you to check out his work.

https://www.facebook.com/vandenisDI/?pnref=lhc

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